Free software goes political in France

For the last three years, the French parliament has been struggling with legislation on copyright and associated rights in information society. It has surfaced in the headlines, portrayed as a fight to force Apple to make its iTunes music downloads playable on competing music boxes. But there's more involved.

Initially, it was a rather obscure exercise of transcribing a 2001 European directive on copyright into French law.  Yet, it has become a major policy battlefield as, in a series of twist and turns, the French legislators first allowed a global licence for peer-to-peer sharing, before criminalizing it and then ordering Apple to make its iTunes system inter-operable.

Ill at ease in a rather technical matter, the government has changed its position several times, in response to contradictory pressures from various concerned parties (media majors, artists, software publishers, grass-root users), which also took various pieces of legislation to the courts. And judicial verdicts have also been contradictory: in March 2006, the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court, quashed a decision by the Appeals court of Versailles that ruled that digital rights management (DRM) techniques were illegal. Not surprisingly, confusion rules supreme. This, of course, has not prevented the process going forward, with the final text approved by the parliament on June 28.

But anybody who believes this is the end is na?ve. The French case attracted international attention not only from the likes of Microsoft and Vivendi Universal but also from the free software militants.

The best-known of those, Richard Stallmann, the father of the GNU operating system and of the Free Software Foundation, has been practically camping in Europe since early June. As part of his lobbying effort, he asked for a meeting with the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. The purpose of the meeting was to present a petition against the current legislative proposals, signed by 165,000 people. In the absence of any official response, Stallmann and his party went to the prime minister?s office on June 9, where they were firmly but politely turned down. 

The whole event received a fair amount of coverage, particularly on the Web. In one interview, Stallmann asked rhetorically why de Villepin rolled out a red carpet for Bill Gates but could not find time to see the father of free software. His French colleagues made pointed comments about the political potential of free software users in the forthcoming French presidential election in 2007. And sure enough, on June 28, Stallmann met with the leading Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, who expressed public support for his view.

The French case demonstrates the difficulties of a traditional political establishment when faced with complex issues triggered by the development of Information Technology.

However, what is new the willingness of proponents of open technologies to enter the political arena. Commenting on Stallmann?s crusade, Glyn Moody, a contributor to Linux Journal, asked a question: Time for Coders to Get Political?