In France, 5 author organizations (including SACD, created in 1777 by Beaumarchais) have published press releases against EUCD.
see the site http://eucd.info/ (in French)
We are conducting a strong action against it.
The big argument of EUCD promoters is that it would stop piracy over the Internet (cf. Napster and P2P)
This is bullshit ... all it takes to defeat technical protection is a program. And people will write such programs. And if they are unable to prevent the exchange of music, how can they prevent the exchange of program intended to circumvent the technical protections.
And if they can do the latter, then they can do the former.
Whatever the case, the law is useless to stop piracy, and it just deprives citizens/consumers of their rights.
It may even encourage piracy:
What would you rather buy, even for the same price :
- a legal damaged CD from a store, that you will not be able to copy.
- or the same CD through an illegal channel, that you will be able to play on any device (existing or future), and duplicate in case it gets hurt.
Bernard
There is another site in UK: http://eucd.org/
if you have other sites, with documents or arguments against EUCD, let us know.
On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 10:01:13AM -0500, Seth Johnson wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Clay pete@flatline.org.uk Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 14:48:55 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [Free-sklyarov-uk] Finnish EUCD implementation postponed (fwd)
Some good news for us .. note the paragraph about "how things changed"
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 16:31:02 +0200 From: Mikko Valimaki mikko.valimaki@effi.org Subject: [eucd] Finnish EUCD implementation postponed
Hi all,
Some breaking news from Finland: our parliament will return the national EUCD law proposal back to the ministry which originally drafted it.
I was today at a parliamentary hearing criticizing the rules on technical protection etc. Ville Oksanen from EFFI was there on wednesday.
After the hearing today the chair of the hearing committee announced that because of heavy criticism it is not possible to accept the law before March elections. Therefore the proposal will be returned back for further drafting.
Of course, this is good news for us. While ministry drafting was quite chilly and the drafters weren't really interested to hear us, the parliament had a different tone. Actually EFFI was the only organization
- among big corporation like Nokia and large media industry lobby
groups
- who got 2 chances to comment the proposal at the parliament.
To get the picture how things changed: today they had for example invited a representative from the official Finnish consumer protection agency to the parliament. The agency had made an announcement criticizing CD-copyprotections back in december after EFFI's public campaign. The agency fellow had really nothing to say about the law proposal in detail (obviously they don't understand it) but she just read their announcement against copyprotected CDs again :)
Today I got the feeling we can really make a difference if we just want to.
Regards, Mikko Electronic Frontier Finland
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