[pp.int.general] France : net censorship + European trial about P2P

[Maxime Rouquet]

Update on the subject of net censorship law in France :

The socialists, the only one who had enough MP to officially appeal to
the Constitutional Council, did not use our text[1] and in a result the
Council did not examine all the articles[2] that violate the Constitution.

The socialists did ask the Council to censor the web filtering article,
but with weak arguments[3]. Despite the Council — who made public his
decision[4] yesterday evening — censored more articles of this security
law than in any other law ever, he considered this web filtering measure
against child porn consistent with the Constitution[5].

This is a huge frustration regarding the work we have done here at Parti
Pirate, and we will not forgive[6] the socialists easily to "protect"
the freedom-killing laws of Nicolas Sarkozy's government they pretend to
oppose.

This very sad news is (just a little bit) softened by a sentence the
Council mentioned in his comments[7], stating that fighting against
sexual exploitation of underage "can justify actions that the
preservation of intellectual property may not" ; however, we have no
assurance that this will remain its position in the future.

Maxime Rouquet
Parti Pirate France


[1] Despite making sure they had received it, and calling them in an
open letter to fix their appeal to the Council, or at least explain
themselves on the omissions :
http://partipirate.org/blog/com.php?id=1370 (in French).
[2] We are for example very concerned about an article of LOPPSI law
dealing with identity theft, that penalizes the use of the identity or
anything that could lead to identify someone in order to affect his
honor or his consideration — this last word not even being defined in
the law.
[3] We had prepared an important explanation to make the Council reject
web censorship because technically this filter can easily be
circumvented. It could have been rejected on the same way the Council
rejected the "carbon contribution" : the aim of the law would not be
reached at all (the carbon contribution was supposed to tax any carbon
emission, but in fact 97% of the emissions were exempt...)
[4]
http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionnel/francais/les-decisions/acces-par-date/decisions-depuis-1959/2011/2011-625-dc/decision-n-2011-625-dc-du-10-mars-2011.94924.html
(in French).
[5] More precisely, he considered that the possibility for anyone to
seize a judge in order to get a website "unblocked" was enough regarding
the importance of the fight against child porn for public order. We
still wonder how the Council could consider this well-balanced as the
owners of blocked website are not even warned of being censored, not to
speak about websites of foreign people who will face many difficulties
if they have to attack France in front of French judges from abroad...
[6] See our reaction here : http://partipirate.org/blog/com.php?id=1375
(in French).
[7]
http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionnel/root/bank/download/2011625DCccc_625dcpdf
(french) web censorship is article 4, the quote is from top of page 5.



On 01/26/2011 01:23 AM, Maxime Rouquet wrote:
> Dear pirates,
> 
> The French Pirate Party is following two cases that might interest you.
> 
> First, a French citizen[1] who was charged 20.000€ for file sharing has
> decided to go up to the European Court of Human Rights. It could be an
> opportunity for the ECHR to state in favor of file sharing, so if you
> know about some jurisprudence that could go that way please feel free to
> contact us[2].
> 
> Second, an major security law called LOPPSI[3] is about to be approved
> by the Parliament. Among many topics[4] it introduces government
> Internet address blocking, pretending to fight child porn. We may have a
> chance to get this censored by the Constitutionnal Council[5].
> 
> At PP France, we have written an appeal to the Council to stopthe
> Internet filtering in LOPPSI. As it is a legislative text, we have
> published it[6] in a "public domain" equivalent licence[7].
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Maxime Rouquet
> Parti Pirate France
> 
> 
> [1] You may have heard about James Climent when the famous French film
> director Jean-Luc Godard gave him 1.000€ to help him pay for his trials.
> You can find his blog (French only) at
> http://etpaflapuce.blogspot.com/and his story in english at
> http://torrentfreak.com/film-director-helps-finance-busted-file-sharers-legal-battle-100914/
> 
> [2] You can contact us at : contact at partipirate.org
> [3] LOPPSI, Orientation and Programmation Law for the Performance of
> Internal Security.
> [4] online identity theft, surveillance cameras, police files, extended
> police powers, private militias, restricted access to public data,
> expropriation, etc...
> [5] who had censored Internet access cutting off for filesharers in 2009
> (HADOPI).
> [6] you can find the text of the actual version here (French only) :
> http://loppsi2.partipirate.org/saisine.php
> [7] Creative Commons CC0, which also allows the opposition in Parliament
> to freely modify it and use it to ask the Council before the law enters
> in action.