Tobias Escher at the OII

At the congress yesterday I also was lucky enough to hear a talk by Jérémie Zimmermann from APRIL, a French association to promote and defend the logic of free/libre software. No clue? Well, not really surprising given that his organisation has been active only in France (and hence in French) but it is a shame as they have been fighting some real battles against DRM and other threats to freedom. Not only did they successfully employ some imaginative campaigns, crucially they were also rather successful!

One sign of their success is their membership figure: More than 1,700 individual as well as corporate members are now supporting the association, even including Google (which might create some of its own problems one day).

Their campaigns included a protest against the European Copyright directive which saw the biggest online petition in France (collecting 165,000 signatures apparently) that eventually stopped the national implementation being whipped through parliament shortly before Christmas 2005. Apart from the online petition some of the strategies employed were systematic calling of MPs by their constituents, a complete set of alternative amendments that would alter the bill in favour of more freedom and that were carefully adapted to each party’s policies. See more information at eucd.info.

Another campaign against DRM saw flash mobs demonstrating in music shops all over the country, one of which was also joined by Richard Stallman and which did not go unnoticed. Some of the activists would also get themselves arrested for the crime of circumventing DRM technologies.

In their latest campaign during the French elections they would try to convince candidates to sign a “pact for Free Software” in which they would declare to further its cause and oppose any measure aimed at limiting some of the freedoms inherent in free software (to copy, modify etc). A distributed campaign with 600 volunteers would lobby 520 candidates to sign the pact. As a result, out of 577 MPs in the French parliament, 66 have signed the pact and can now be called upon to act!

Jérémie summarized some of their main insights from their campaigns as follows

public :

• only use basic arguments to engage citizens
• explicit striking examples
• simple atomic actions (that someone can do in a couple of minutes, provide templates)

journalists:

• call ALL papers (again and again)
• identify specialists
• trade exclusive infos

politicians:

• want to get reelected
• real lack of expertise
• carrots or sticks
• indirect menaces work! (e.g. someone else signed it)

He argued that prospects for protest are not that grim because “We are many, they are few!” and concluded with a call to network national efforts. Actually my summary does not do justice to Jérémie’s great talk so have a look for yourself. A video should be available soon here.