Hi,

It's about time to decide weather we will attempt to let the gathered
signatures be verified at all. Judging from the signature gathering
status<http://wiki.no-dmca.ch/SignatureGatheringStatus>and the amount
I received (I have about 150 signatures) I don't think
there's a point.
Please report your counts in either via mail or on the signature gathering
site. By the end of the year if all of you agree, and no surprising amount
of signatures show up, I'll change the website and declare the gathering of
signatures (and the Referendum effort) futile.
Don't be sad, I consider even the couple hundred we gathered, and the amount
of controversy we managed to stir up a great success.

Es ist Zeit zu entscheiden ob wir die Unterschriften beglaubigen lassen.
Wenn ich mir den sammel
status<http://wiki.no-dmca.ch/SignatureGatheringStatus>anschaue sowie
die Eingänge bei mir (ich habe etwa 150 unterschriften), dann
denke ich es besteht kein Zweck in der beglaubigung.
Lasst mich wissen wieviele unterschriften ihr habt oder tragt es auf die
signatur sammel seite ein. Wenn ihr alle einverstanden seid, und keine
unmengen an signaturen auf einmal auftauchen, werde ich die webseite ende
jahr ändern und das sammeln von unterschriften sowie das Referendum für
zwecklos erklären.
Seid nicht traurig, die paar hundert unterschriften und die debatte die wir
noch etwas beleben konnten empfinde ich als grossen erfolg.

Stay tuned, the next law _will_ come.
Florian

Hi,

I think it's past time. I cancelled my plans to gather a few
signatures and to get a few others interested when I realised that
there was no plan or agreement about what to do with the signatures.
That and the lack of longer-term effort to advertise and into which to
recruit people under the pretext of signature gathering.

Is there any number that would make you say there's a point?
It was clear for a long time (if not from the beginning) that few
signatures would be collected. I had half-jokingly guessed 200 on the
11th, hoping to be proven wrong of course.

As far as I'm concerned, a failed referendum is, de facto, a petition.
Of course, there's the small matter of knowing where to bring or to
send it... and maybe there's no point if there are so few signatures.
Still, if one indeed wants to stand up and be counted, the way to do
that would be to get every signature verified and/or acknowledged,
isn't it?

done

I don't understand why it wasn't done earlier... or why it has to be
done at all for that matter. But don't let that stop you: your plan if
fine by me.

Well... people with far greater resources have been known to throw in
the towel and to buy the damn signatures.

Staying tuned might not be enough... unless you want to do another of
these symbolic referenda of course.
There are still things that could be done about this law by the way.
In most legislations, there's no provision for referenda and laws
still get resisted.
I've heard a couple of ideas from Didier and Jan if I remember well
(and I don't have the legal knowledge to comment on them) but there's
other things that could be tried... of course, what would or wouldn't
make sense would depend on the outlook and goals of whatever group
would be formed for that purpose.

As far as I'm concerned, the first thing to do would be for whoever
wants to get stuff done to agree on a position and on goals.
Ideally, some person or organisation who's actually being targeted or
harmed by this law or by the thrust of this "intellectual
appropriation" business in general would get the ball rolling.
I don't feel too threatend myself and I feel there are more important
issues as well so please forgive me if I don't feel like spending too
much energy preaching in the desert at this point. I don't want to
push my possibly disruptive outlook and ideas on this list either,
especially since the signature gathering is not officially over.

All I want to say for now is that dismissing planning because one has
no plan is circular reasoning... and so is dismissing politics because
politicians aren't accountable (see the "Why no compromise" thread).
Neither plans or accountability grow on trees, you know.

Thanks for all your efforts! One thing I've learnt from all this: it's
very difficult to gather 50'000 signatures if you don't have political
parties or associations (i.e. money) on your side. Also, democracy can
only work if people have the required knowledge to understand the law,
which is obviously not the case here (DRM is actually quite hard to
explain to "normal" persons). I think this last point will only get
worse with time (with new technologies and so on).

Olivier

On Dec 25, 11:40 am, "Florian Bösch" <pya...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Dec 27, 2007 7:18 AM, Julien <pierrehumb...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't expect you to understand the concept of activism despite hope. But
even for this there's logical limits, and in my opinion one shouldn't
stretch it past it's given time.

We have more then 200, and yes, there is no point from the start, but it
doesn't harm that _if_ you intend to stop you make that clear for people who
haven't been in on it from the start.

A petitions signatures do not have to be verified, and I don't think a
failed Referendum is automatically a Petition, but I have no concrete idea
either.

Since it's me who started this thing, it's me who has to set an end to it.
There was a point starting it, and following your logic I wouldn't have
started it at all, yet I did. Since I started it, I do need to communicate
the end of it.

Well... people with far greater resources have been known to throw in

You can't buy signatures (you can buy the service of agencies collecting
them however)

Staying tuned might not be enough... unless you want to do another of

You're right, but I'm not the man with the plan. You're more then welcome to
engage people with the irc channel, the mailing list and the wiki to form
plans and such.

Cheers,
Florian

You're being overly cynical.
Money is not the main assets of parties and associations and
relatively poor ones have succeeded in gathering enough signatures in
the past.

I don't think you'll find a place and time in history when and where
most people really understood laws.
Politics has not required this kind of understanding in the past and I
don't know why it should now.

Based on what Didier told me, it's possible (for people with his
talent anyway) to gather 40 signatures a day without money and with
the current level of understanding. You'd need 250 such people to
spend five days collecting to get to 50K... do you think it can't be
done? Please compare that to the time and money that would be spent on
campaigning, voting and counting if the signatures were gathered. This
isn't supposed to be easy.

Cheers everyone,

On Dec 27, 2:54 pm, Julien <pierrehumb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yep. I guess money and/or a lot of people willing to do the work for
free. But, then, you have to motivate them. Try to do that with DRM
and not taxes or naturalization issues... :-)

It does now, because technology has become more complex and it will
never cease to get more complex (not anytime soon, at least). You
can't always compare everything with what happened one century or two
ago. Even 10 years ago. *Some* things were very different in the past.
Not all of them, of course. Technology is something that changes a lot
and in a very fast fashion (it tends to change exponentially, not
linearly). The gap in knowledge between "normal people" and the
persons involved with the most complex technologies will never get
smaller. It will always get wider. So, when laws have to be written
about these technologies, you can bet fewer and fewer people will
really understand them.

Olivier

On Dec 31, 2007 4:51 PM, Olivier Bruchez <olivier.bruc...@gmail.com> wrote:

I whole heartedly agree with that. Sticking your head in the sand and say
that everything's fine and we will cope somehow, because it worked the last
113 or so years is naive. Progress is accelerating, and hence change is a
nonlinear function. We're approaching a society of perpetually future
shocked monkeys. If we want to cope with the world in the foreseeable
future, our methods and ways to address problems have to change as radically
as society around us changes.
There _will_ always be people with a budget and an agenda and enough
understanding of the nature of change, to exploit this force of change to
their own benefits, to the disadvantage of society at large. This is the
pivotal problem Democracies globally face today.

Hi,

I don't understand the joke. This is precisely what the referendum is/
was about, isn't it?
Do you think it can't be done? Witness how many people are concerned
about the outwardly technical issues involved in ecological issues
(GMOs, nuke plants, and so on) nowadays. Yes, these are more important
than DRM and I don't expect anyone to become as fanatical about
copyright issues but my point is that that movement wasn't built
overnight.

You have not explained how you came to this conclusion.
There may be a misunderstanding: I'm not saying that nothing is
changing or that technology is irrelevant. We wouldn't be talking
about this if copying and sharing information didn't become a lot
cheaper over the past couple of decades.
What I'm saying is that politics hasn't worked from of a widespread,
deep understanding of the issues so far. This isn't a problem peculiar
to technology: economic issues can be quite arcane as well for
example.
In fact, if anything, because it is laws and not specifications or a
standards we're talking about, legal expertise is what's needed... not
technical expertise. As far as I can see, nobody here knows for sure
what this new copyright law even means! According to Didier (and if I
remember well), newspapers are having the same problem and their
lawyers are confused as well.

Evidently, political expertise would be really useful as well.

On Jan 1, 2008 7:59 PM, Julien <pierrehumb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure legal and economical capacity is required, but what you ignore is that
if you want to _understand_ the implications of something inherently
technical, you have to be capable to technically understand it, first.
Lawyers aren't struggling with this new law because it would be a
particularly hairy law, they're struggling because they can't grasp the
technological implications of this, because they're not techies.
You're trying to oversimplify  something  extremely complex here.  And
first of all, technical expirience is required, without it you won't even
grok what this law is about at all.

On Jan 1, 7:59 pm, Julien <pierrehumb...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it can be done, but it is way more difficult. Everybody thinks
he/she's an expert, when it comes to taxes, naturalization, or even
GMOs or nuclear power plants. Because everybody has heard about it at
least once in their life. Almost nobody knows what DRM is (in the
general population). That's all I was saying. Just try to imagine
people discussing DRM in a café in a small Swiss village... That's not
what people usually talk about. That's not what they're interested in.

People like Ray Kurzweil have explained it way better than I will be
able to explain it. Just search for keywords like "technological
singularity" or "law of accelerating returns". Or check out these
articles on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Of course, you don't have to agree with everything people like
Kurzweil say, but it's interesting nevertheless.

Olivier

Guess what? I'm not convinced.

But first, isn't it time to stop telling people to send us signatures?
I'll keep updating the status page but, if there's no plan to do
anything with those signatures, I think we should tell people that
there's no point in sending them (and remove our addresses so as to
avoid any confusion).

Florian,

Could you please enlighten us on the thorny technological issues
involved then? It seems quite simple to me (unlike the legal issues
with the contradictions of article 39 for example) so I guess I must
have missed something.
Again, I'm not talking about the implementation of DRM systems or some
such which certainly requires technical skills but the passing of
general laws such as this one. It seems it's possible to "grok" the
political issues around genetical engineering (just an example)
without any technical understanding so why would that be required when
it comes to copyright issues?

Olivier,

Agreed... but I thought we were talking about people involved in
political organisations and such, not the average rural café patron.

What people are or aren't interested in isn't set in stone by the way.
By and large, people seem highly influenceable when it comes to
conversation topics actually... the trouble is, who's doing the
influencing?

Putting aside the issue of how credible this stuff is, I don't get why
you're bringing it up. What has this got to do with politics? The
linked articles don't tell.
Specifically, how does the speed of technological evolution change
people's role in the regulation of technologies they wouldn't
understand anyway?

We all live in a world we understand very little about.
Swiss citizens have had to vote on monetary policy for example...
how's that easier to understand than DRM?

On Jan 4, 2008 8:21 PM, Julien <pierrehumb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes you've missed a lot actually.

You do know that there's a trusted computing initiative and what they do of
course. Now if you combine trusted computing hardware with DRM you have a
consumer unfriendly ecosystem of content and devices, that's quite obvious
to see, and is easely demonstrated by say, HD monitors and HD content from
netflix for instance in conjunction with windows vista. But it's only one of
the myriad of problems.

DRM systems quite generally are the epitome of proprietary technology and
vendor lock ins, and encouragment to do them, respectively laws to protect
them will only make that way worse.

Copy protection quite literally means copy restrictions. And it is systems
engineered by people who _do_ understand technology for people who _don't_,
to be hard to use in a certain way (copying), which happens to be one of the
more convinient things to do usually (with digital things). That in itself
is a dire betrayal of one of the most marvelous inventions and forces of
change that the digital age brought about.
To see why exactly this would be problem, a simple example would suffice,
like say, copy your music from one of your iPods, using iTunes, to the
other. Good luck!

There's laws that do regulate copying and related rights. Copy restriction
mechanisms are used by the content providers to invent entirely new
restrictions of what you can't do with your content, that would otherwise be
entirely allowed and lgal use (like restricting how many times you may
consume content, how long you may consume it, how good the output quality is
going to be, how much of it you can consume, and they won't stop there,
either). That would all be alright, if it was just a contract between
parties on an equal footing, but with this new law it isn't. It's a contract
where one party (provider) now has legal protection for all its terms, and
the other (consumer) has no legal recourse to ensure theirs.

The laws intent (or so I'm told) is to enable copyright holders to excert a
new business modell better (that one of copy protected content). And with it
they give the copy restriction industry a special status. There is only
about a handfull of companies globally that produce copy restriction
mechanisms, they _all_ do license their technology at a considerable price
only. The usual "copyright holder" meaning the author, musician, writer etc.
isn't _ever_ going to be able to afford applying copy protection to _their_
content. The only ones, that will make any business with copy restricted
content, are the big content aggregators, Warner, Universal, Sony-BMG and
EMI. And these companies, let the authors, artists, singers etc. bleed dry
on digital downloads. If you're an artist, you're not seeing a dime of what
you sell on iTunes, and your CD sales, are in fact going to make you more
money, despite the bigger volume of digital downloads. It's because of this,
that artist of late, especially well situated ones, have been jumping ship
on this content mafia and try to engage their audience directly.

All the while, the industry is suing, harrasing, threatening and bullying
it's customers wherever they find _any_ legal footing to do so. It has been
observed, quite often in the development of industries, that when companies
turn to sue and harras and threaten everybody all around, they're usually in
the process of upheval, change or collapse. I find it extremely dangerous to
change the legal situation right this moment.

Apparently switzerland believes in a free mostly unregulated economy, but
this new law is just that, it's a regulation custom tailored to a specific
en vogue industry that may or may not turn out to be important. Instead of
leaving it to market forces to determine the merit of copy restriction as a
business, we now have it in our law.

The law intends to address copy protection schemes, who are without fail
applied by third parties to the content. Weather or not the copyright
holders meant the protection to be in place or not, is an entirely different
question, and it's completely opaque to the customer and to the lawmaker.
The company who will sue you for circumvention of a copy protection scheme
isn't the copyright holder of the respective content, it'll be the company
who produced the copy protection scheme. Somehow a law now that indended to
give the copyright holder new rights, ended up giving the copy protection
industry a new way to assert their business model. I find that just
hillarious.

The law furthermore defines protection worthy protection schemes only the
ones that are "effective" without defining what "effective" means. Copy
restriction cannot be "effective" in any way, since it violates the
principle of susi&bob in encryption. On the other hand it can succeed to
make it virtually impossible for the consumer to circumvent the
restrictions, unfortunately along the road you've created a whole range of
more closed devices which out of neccessity can't be opened to software
developers and consumers in any great way. Not only is so the actual service
quality with copy protected content greatly reduced (and I can observe this
absymal service quality daily), no a whole ecosystem of devices and software
has been entirely prevented. The whole family of iPods/iPhone is a great
example for that, there's great 3rd party apps out there for them, but
everytime apple releases a software update it all breaks again, hence
marginalizing people who would _like_ to do software for this devices for
people who would _like_ to use it. A law encourging just that, can somehow
not be right.

Florian,

Most of your post is about business models, politics and such. That's
the interesting stuff and that's where I have some disagreements with
you.
I only managed to find these technological issues:

Indeed, that's quite obvious and the whole point of DRM. Does one
really need a technological background to understand that?

Again, quite obvious. I don't think technological understanding is
required to understand this.

I don't know what principle you're talking about (I suppose it would
be enough to look it up) but that doesn't stop me from understanding
how copy protection can't be effective. Again, I don't think any
technological knowledge is necessary to understand this... only to
understand why that is.

You've got a point there. This is something which is probably not
trivial to understand for someone who doesn't understand technology
although it's more of a business issue than a technological issue.
I don't think it's a very important point because much of this stuff
follows logically from the lock-in business which should be easy for
everyone to understand with general concepts like "only compatible
with", "no competition" and so on. I think it would be harder to
explain this stuff to someone who has no understanding of simple
economic concepts such as competition, monopolies and so on than to
someone who has no understanding of the technology involved.