Communiqué ACTA

Page de traduction en anglais du communiqué de presse sur ACTA : http://www.april.org/fr/acta-tapi-dans-lombre-de-la-dadvsi

ACTA lurking in the DADVSI shadows?

Paris, March the 8th 2009. Press release.

April invites the French government to suspend its participation to the ACTA negotiations as long as previous treaties have not been assessed. As it stands, the ACTA treaty could jeopardize Free Software through the aggravation of existing pro-DRM provisions.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an international treaty aiming to redefine copyright and patent policies: from generic drugs to internet actors' legal liability, the negotiated provisions perimeter is large. Rather than taking into account changes brought by information society, this treaty would aim to strengthen technological models which have demonstrated their inefficiency. The part which recently leaked on Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a particularly telling example.

This treaty comes nearly 15 years after « OMPI treaties » which already attempted to impose DRM on the international stage. In 2001, international negotiations gave birth to European directive EUCD, transposed into French law through the law called « DADVSI » in 2006. The lawmaker had expressly demanded that a report on this law's implementation be handed to him within 18 months after its promulgation. Three and half years later, this report has still to be started. April reminds that Eric Walter, who has just been name general secretary to HADOPI, had indicated in 2007 (as responsible to Nicolas Sarkozy's internet campaign) that the DADVSI assessment would be « done in the most open possible way and that consequences would be drawn from it ». As only consequences drawn from useless and harmful DADVSI, Nicolas Sarkozy has delivered the ludicrous HADOPI and its hallucinating filtering snitches...

Despite an evident lack of communication between French and European institutions, it is now demonstrated that France is participating in these negotiations. April wonders about France thus engaging into a negotiation process without having, previously, evaluated earlier treaty's impact. « If government has consideration for the lawmaker's work, he should suspend his participation to negotiations. By taking the time to examine the impact of the pro-DRM provisions enacted by the DADVSI law, it would discover that legal protection of these technologies is not a solution » said Tangui Morlier, April's president.

April has, multiple times, demonstrated that DRM are incompatible with Free Software. These digital handcuffs, which effectiveness depend on secrecy, are fundamentally incompatible with essential liberties offered by Free Software licenses. By proposing to increase the current DRM provisions, ACTA represents a serious threat for Free Software. Therefore, April will contact French and European deputies to inform them of these dangers.

« We have opposed since 2008 the ACTA treaty when learning about its existence. This is for this reason we call all Free Software users to demand to their national parliamentarians to take a stand against these negotiations » declares Frédéric Couchet, April's general secretary.

At the European scale, four euro deputies have submitted a written declaration opposing ACTA. April supports the call from "la Quadrature du net" to sign this written declaration.