French Arts Community Revolts Against French Three Strikes Legislation
It seems that opposition is mounting against the return of France’s ‘Three Strikes Law’ (Also known as Hadopi). Today, there’s a dramatic increase to condemn the three strikes law from the people rights holders claim to defend - artists.
A blog posting that has already translated the news from French to English details the latest developments. The question they ask is, ‘who gets to control the future?’
“We,” the blog post begins, “the world of science-fiction, writers, translators, illustrators, critics, commentators, essayists, bookshop-owners, bloggers, publishers and collection editors, must express through this text our opposition to the Creation and Internet law.”
That’s quite a list of people who oppose the new law.
“It would be a truism to state that science-fiction concerns itself with the future and that many of its participants have denounced the possible, even probable, pitfalls (dérives) of industrial and technological societies;” the posting continues, “George Orwell’s name comes immediately to one’s lips, but also that of John Brunner, Norman Spinrad, Michel Jeury, J.-G. Ballard, Frederik Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and many others besides.”
This law, which we are told will protect artists’ rights and copyright in general, seems to us a Trojan horse, deployed to try and establish control over the internet, and is thus a threat to freedom of expression in our country.
Artists, creators, all those cultural actors without whom that word would be emptied of meaning, are being instrumentalised for the benefit of a law which, we must remind everyone, contains measures to filter the net, install spyware on individuals machines, and suspend internet connections without the involvement of a judge on the basis of IP numbers (whose lack of reliability has long been established) collected by private companies, and the extension of measures initially conceived for police anti-terrorist activity to the sharing of files between individuals.
Canadians who are following these developments might be reminded of the political fallout when the Canadian Recording Industry Association and other US arms of the copyright industry existing in Canada tried to claim that restricting copyright laws in Canada is suppose to benefit artists and innovators. In a nutshell, Canadian artists left the CRIA in droves and formed their own coalition to fight restrictive copyright law proposals.
So who is a part of this voice against the French three strikes law? Here’s the list of signatories:
Go To Source To See The Long Ass List
It’s quite telling when the artistic community revolts against measures that are purported to be helping the artists.
:source: Source: Da French Revolution Begins | Canadian artists left the CRIA in droves
