Camp 2007 - 1.01

Chaos Communication Camp 2007
To infinity and beyond

Speakers
jz
Schedule
Day 4
Room Shelter Foo
Start time 17:00
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 2007
Event type Lecture
Track Community
Language English
Feedback

Campaigns for promoting and defending digital freedom in France

How the french libre software activists do it

A presentation of a few successful campaigns in France in the field of defending freedom in a digital world: bringing awareness against the dangers of the EUCD transposition, against DRM, and influence the candidates to a presidential race to talk about Libre Software. What have we learned? How to do it? How to achieve better cooperation between associations/NGOs?

Our association, APRIL, is getting bigger and bigger (we just passed the 1000th member, and had last year corporate members such as SUN Microsystems, Thalès, Neuf/Cegetel, Wengo, Fon, Thalès, Mandriva, Adacore, etc.). We're trying to get awareness about Libre Software, and defend it whenever it's in danger.

For the last few years, a few manaces went more and more precise against Libre Software, and whenever Libre Software is in danger, it's all our freedoms in the digital world that are endangered too. So we built campaigns to structure our efforts about promoting and defending our freedoms.

  • EUCD.info : for 3 years, 1 to 3 persons worked full-time to build arguments, contact politics, write amendements, contact journalists, about the French transposition of the EUCD directive (DADVSI law). More than just making illegal to circumvent DRM, this transposition brought very specific "legal tools" supposed to "fight piracy" that were among the most hardcore ever seen. Many of them were pushed back thanx to the EUCD.info initiative, but some of them are still around : private police of the Internet, censorship of authors of software "used for pirating", mandatory use of DRM, etc.

Our efforts went way further than just inside the legal text or the parliament, and many "collateral benefits" were obtained from this fight.

  • Candidats.fr objective was to influence the candidates to a presidential race to talk about Libre Software (Candidats.fr). 9 out of the 12 candidates, including the 6 first ones, replied to our very precise questionnaire (32 cornering questions!), giving time and work to consider the questions of Libre Software, interoperability, DRM, software patents, open standards, etc.

We are continuing right now with the Législative Campaign, for deputy elections, and a brief about contacting those 7600 candidates with a distributed network of volunteers will be included too (work in progress ;)

  • StopDRM.info is too a French group about raising awareness on DRM that organised flashmobs (with up to 100 persons!) in superstores, and gave themselves to the police for having circumvented DRM under the new DADVSI law.

  • What have we learned ? How to do it ? What are the pitfalls to avoid ? How to "spin" a campaign ? How to achieve better cooperation between associations/NGOs ?

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