The part that reminded me immediately of ScummVm is as follows:
An amendment to the proposed DADVSI bill has the aim of making criminal counterfeiting out of publication, distribution and promotion of all software susceptible to being used to open up data protected by author's right and not integrating a method of controlling and tracking private usage (technical measure).
If passed, how do you think this might affect the project?
it could mean MS Word would be illegal, since i could open a manuscript in DOC format written by someone else. and hence it would be the otrher persons data....
this is silly.
and the "tracking" thing probably means: "let you software phone home or get busted"....
ScummVM will not be affected in any way. I won't elaborate on this, because this bill is such a contradictory piece of crap that it's pretty much impossible to make sense out of it.
But even if such a stupid bill managed to somehow get passed, it shouldn't apply to ScummVM. And even if it did, we're not going to honor it in any way :)
http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html wrote:Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.
Now this is simply ehrm... an idiocy. They require me to shut up my mouth? I wrote that code. My will for it is to print it in newspapers or, say, be shown on TV or published in Internet and I use my own resources for that. Who will stop me?
The policy of the current right wing government is clear: nothing should be free. Capitalism at its finest :)
Culture (amongst other things, like science and research) has never been a priority of this unpopular government, so I'm not surprised it's easily influenced by lobbies like the SACEM (French RIAA) or Vivendi when those come up with a "clever" idea.
Anyway, the bill would have to be approved by the Parliament, and chances are it won't.
LogicDeLuxe wrote:That's not all. It goes even worse:
http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html wrote:Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.
I believe this bit of the bill deals only with software that bypasses DRM.
Also consider that VU = Vivendi Universal, BSA = Business Software Association, SACEM = French version of the RIAA, and SNEP/SCPP are two trade groups dealing with music licensing / revenue etc.
All of these groups have always had a vested interest in killing civil liberties. None of them are even remotely authorised to speak on behalf of the French government :)
An amendment to the proposed DADVSI bill has the aim of making criminal counterfeiting out of publication, distribution and promotion of all software susceptible to being used to open up data protected by author's right and not integrating a method of controlling and tracking private usage (technical measure).
I think this amendment is meant for formats like PDF where the author can set up protections on the content, but the reading software has to honor them, and some cheap (or pirate) readers do not care about the protection. It's of course also meant to legally protect all kinds of DRM on legally sold music from being cracked (at least, make these cracks legally punishable).
This isn't as bad as the DMCA, but still I think there's too many ways this thing can be reinterpreted that threatens a whole load of software, so I'm definitely against this stuff.
