Dear friends and fellow Wikimedians,
French parliamentarians are going crazy: they're about to vote a Creation Bill,
which - we think - will seriously harm the Wikimedia projects and free
knowledge in general.
It all began with fight for freedom of panorama in French Parliament last
winter. As you may know, right-holders associations heavily mobilized against
it, and got a lot of coverage. This first fight was just a tree hiding the
forest. With the Creation bill, two new measures are about to privatize the
public domain:
1. Very soon, it will not be legal anymore to upload pictures Castle of
Chambord, Versailles, etc on Wikimedia Commons. You can find the explanation in
this blog post (in French) :
http://blog.wikimedia.fr/copyfraud-sur-les-domaines-nationaux-9172
2. Perhaps even more importantly, search engines will be charged with a
mandatory fee, which that puts on the same level all legal and illegal images
and totally violates the creative commons licenses...
These two measures will be ratified by the French National Assembly. We did
everything we could at Wikimedia France to try to stop this madness.
If you have any ideas on how to help us prevent such a disaster, please don't
hesitate to reach out to us,
Best regards,
--
Emeric Vallespi
Chairman
Twitter @evallespi
WIKIMEDIA FRANCE
Association pour le libre partage de la connaissance
www.wikimedia.fr @Wikimedia_Fr
40 rue de clery, 75002 Paris
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