The "War On Sharing" In The EU
Zimmermann, Jérémie
Toolbox And Strategies For Winning The "War On Sharing" In The EU: Decentralized citizen movements helped raise massive awareness on legislative and political processes such as SOPA/PIPA in the US, or ACTA on a global scale. How can citizens face these multiple attacks against our freedom online by proposing an alternative to repressive policies? How can we collectively put an end to the "war on sharing" waged against entertainment industries' best clients, in order to foster a vivid digital culture online while protecting a free, open and neutral Internet, and the lulz?
 Hi everyone, thank you for being here. I'm Jeremy Zimemann, I'm the co-founder and spokesperson of Lacroix-Draitur-Junette, we're a citizen organization defending fundamental freedoms online, you may know about our work. We are building a kind of citizen toolbox to help everyone understand what is going on when our freedoms online are attacked and tools to help everybody participate in the debate. We've been mostly busy in the last three years kicking Acta's ass, you may have heard of it, but the job is not done yet and this is partly what I'm going to tell you tonight. I come here with kind of bad news, then kind of good news and a little bit of a plan. The bad news is that there's a war going on, you may be aware of that, this war is the war against sharing. Those copyright industries have been waging it for the last 15 years, they've been trying to push all the representative measures you've heard about from the DMCA in the US to the EU CD and the IPRED in the EU and various national transposition of all of this. It's all clear to all of you, you've seen the strategy from suing the individuals to trying to automatize the suing, corrupting governments to install some administrative authorities that would bypass the judicial like the French case. Well, this is so over, this is so prehistory. The strategy right now is to push enforcement at the very heart of the network. How many among you have read at least one version of Acta? The final one. That's much more than the average, I may be more or less familiar with this principle that Acta pushes for a cooperation, when I'm using the air quote it means I'm quoting bits of it. It's pushing for cooperative efforts between the ISPs, the service providers, the YouTube, the Emotions, the Facebooks of this world, but as well the access providers, the Vodafone, the Orange, Deutsche Leicombe and so on and so on. A collaboration between those ISPs on one hand and the copyright industry on the other hand. The point of that collaboration is to impose measures or remedies to deter further infringement. So it sounds quite harmless when you look at it, but when you think about it with a technical mind, measures to deter further infringement can only amount in technical terms to automated blocking of content, blocking of access to content, filtering of communication and discrimination between those communications or automated removal of content. All of which you would recognize amount to the very equivalent with the kind of censorship that is being done for political purposes in some not so friendly and not so democratic countries. The bad news is that by pushing enforcement at the very heart of the network, we may be about to make a step that will be impossible to go backwards. By programming machines at the heart of the network to decide what has to go through and what cannot go through, we will pave the way to the generalization of the deployment of the very same machines that are used on one hand by the dictators to censor content and spy on their populations and on the other hand on telecoms operators to restrict their users' communications in the name of creating new business models by hurting net neutrality. Once we've done that for copyright, there's no way we go backwards. So the bad news is that this war against sharing is taking a turn as of today that may be very much decisive for the future of the internet as we know it. What is at stake here is the very architecture of a free, open, decentralized and universal internet. The internet we love and care about is what it is because of this architecture. Architecture matters. And the very characteristics of this architecture is that the internet we love and share is decentralized. It is universal. This universality means that everyone accessing a free internet has access to the very same content, service and applications, but also has the ability to publish some. You know that this is how you invent stuff. This is how you experiment. This is how you deploy something. This is how you create startups. This is how you invent. This is how you remix. This is how you mash up. This is how we share. It is because of the very universality of this architecture that we call the internet, that we're about to maybe change our societies, that we're about maybe to change ourselves and become better persons if it remains that way. Well, by its universality, a free internet is what economists would call a common good. It is universal. Therefore, we all share it. We all own it. It would be a mistake to acknowledge that the people running the wires are the people who run the internet, who own the internet, sorry, that the people who run the routers are the people who own the internet, that the people who manufacture those terminals that enslave you into proprietary software, hell, and close chips are the ones who own the internet. No. The internet as the aggregate of our intelligences is a common good. We all own it. We all have our share in it, even if we're using Facebook or whatever, rather centralized bullshit there is out there. And as a common good, we commonly own it, which means that we have a responsibility over it. We have a responsibility to deliver to the next generation the very same tool we had between our hands to become better persons and to change our society. This is one of the greatest responsibilities we've had. This is probably one of the most important challenges our generations have to face. And you know probably as well as I do that if we do not manage to maintain this universal architecture as it is, all the other global issues that are at stake, whether they're environment, finance, energy, or whatever, will be so much more difficult to solve in a way that would represent us, that would represent the general interest. But you probably all know that already because you're here in Republica, right? So that was the sad news. The good news is that there is something we can do about it. And that we have evidence of that. You've all witnessed the sopa and pipa fight in the US. Some of all may actually believe that this was a fight in the US. But most of us know that it wasn't. It's not the US citizens alone who kicked sopa and pipa out of the Senate and the Congress. It's the whole Internet. It is us. It is every one of us. I mean, we turned the website, we blacked out a website for sopa and pipa because we thought it was mostly the same thing as ACTA. But I guess that many of you did the same. Many of you blogged about sopa and pipa in your own language, retweeted, retweeted. We were all part of it. The Internet, the universal and free Internet kicked sopa and pipa's ass. And that's something. And that's evidence for everyone who will tell you, oh, there's nothing we can do about that. It's over. We cannot fight it. And so now it's wrong. And look at ACTA. Who here didn't never heard about ACTA? Who have never heard about ACTA? Nobody. Nobody. One year ago, the answer would have been the total opposite. We've been working and when I say, it's not only the quadrature of the net, many people around here, once again, all of us, we worked for that. The whole Internet went on fire when the European executive, with all its arrogance, signed this thing a very few days after the seizure of mega-upload by the FBI. The whole Internet turned on fire. It's not only the EU. And once again, we achieved something incredible. We literally turned the European Parliament over. Well, we may be about to do so. And that's one of the, maybe the sad part in the good news is that we may be about to win about ACTA in the European Parliament, but it's not won yet. And if at one single stage we lower our guard, then we may lose it. So let's not be overconfident about it. But right now, as of today in the European Parliament, you can feel the delicate smell, the delicate scent of victory in the air because so many more people understand the importance of ACTA, the importance of these issues for the future of our societies, for the future of the free Internet, and for the future of copyright. So we achieved something tremendous and we have to confirm that. We have to win this ACTA battle in the European Parliament, period. And we know how to do this. We know how to do this because we've been doing that for some times. We have to be there at each and every step, all the boring steps in the procedure of the European Parliament. And we may have an occasion to talk about it in the Q&A or later with some drinks. Five committees working on a report, the report being presented in plenary a yes or no vote. The vote will be around the summer. You'll hear about it again soon. We have to be present and active and not lower our guard at each and every step. And we must win this ACTA battle in the European Parliament. But even more importantly than that, we have to keep the eyes on the price. If ACTA is just pushed away and nobody cares, well, this may not happen. Then an ACTA 2 will come back. An ACTA 2 may start being negotiated. The day ACTA is kicked into the European Parliament. And an ACTA 3 and an ACTA 4 and I have prayed 12 may come one after another as they stacked up for the last 15 years. With the tremendous momentum we are achieving at the moment, we have a responsibility to do something more about it. I think that it is time that we literally put an end to this absurd and dangerous war against sharing. They are feeding us with lies. They are feeding the elected representatives with lies. They are telling that whenever one of these industries loses some money, it is because of the culture enthusiasts who share digital files between them with no intent of profit. And we all know this is wrong. I mean, the French ad-op, the Three Strikes Authority, demonstrated in its own study that people who do the more file sharing are people who spend the more for culture. So many independent academic studies prove the same. All of us here do file sharing maybe since Napster existed. And all of us know that the more you get access to culture, the more cultivated you get, the more culture matters to you, the more you will go to concerts, to theater, to movies, the more you will buy books. It is exactly the same thing as the people going in the libraries, borrowing the more books in the libraries being the people who buy the more books. We all know that, right? Well, then we must turn that into public policy. So those industries stop attacking the very essence, the very fabric, the very architecture of what makes our free Internet so great. And there is a very simple solution for that. It's called the limitations and exceptions to copyright. It's called fair use. This is the bit of the law where the author doesn't have his or her word. This is part of copyright. These are parts that are excluded from copyright. These are parts that are of general interest. When you want to show a movie to a classroom, you do not have to ask for permission because education is of higher social value than copyright. When you lend a book to a friend, you don't ask for permission because lending and friends and sharing is more important than copyright. And it couldn't be enforced anyway. When you create a parody of the work, you don't have to ask for permission. You just do it because a parody is essential for freedom of speech, which is essential for democratic participation that is indeed more important than copyright. Well, sharing of culture is just the same. And we have to shout it loud and clear. We have to make evident. And we have to stand for it. We have to turn the sharing of files between individuals and not for profit into an exception to copyright. And then we will ultimately shut the mouth of those industries who will go counter to our fundamental freedoms online and counter to the most precious tool we have between our hands for improving the world we live in. So that's the plan. And now you ask me, how do we get there? You ask me. Thank you. The answer is partly I don't know. And partly I got a bit of a clue. There is this 2001 slash 29 directive in the EU. It was supposed to harmonize copyright, but didn't harmonize anything. It is a failure on all regard. And the two studies that landed on the commission's desk said the same. So as the commissioner, the French commissioner, Michel Barnier, is announcing that he will maybe and it will get more complicated if we kick actors out, revise this IPRED, the enforcement directive. We must be louder than him in asking that the EU city, the 2001 slash 29, be reopened and that exceptions be renegotiated and that all rights as the public and that all right to share culture be integrated and made into the EU law. I have the impression that this is something we can achieve. And how do we do that? Well, first of all, we look at what we did. We look at what we did with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA and we ask ourselves how to do it better. What we did was to use every single node of the decentralized internet for what it was or for what it wasn't, for what we hadn't think it was, is to use every single word we had in our minds to make it loud and clear that those things had to be kicked out is to use every single pixel that we found available online and turn it into something else that was conveying a message. It's to go and talk to every possible community from the development people for access to medication in Africa to the AIDS patients and gay rights people to the farmers sharing seeds to some artists to the standard human rights organizations to journalists to outreach everywhere and we have to convey this message. This is our responsibility to care about this free internet and to protect it from those interests that want to turn it into some television 5.0. We have to do it because we understand what it is about. We have to do it because as we understand what it is about and as this is a common good that we own and share collectively and as this is a battle that we have an occasion to win, well we just cannot afford to lose that one. Thank you very much. And this is where I hope there will be comments, trolls and questions. I see a hand here. Oh, maybe it's simple if you come and line in the middle. Hi Jeremy. I've seen you giving these talks like 2009, 2010, 2011 and now and you always pretend we all can do something but actually all it took was Wikipedia going down for a day. So I think it's not about all of us, it's about the big players. I'm sorry I have to disagree with that. I know a bit how it is to deal with the people from the Wikimedia Foundation. There are very heavy structures now, they have a lot of inertia, they're consensus based and it's very difficult to make them take positions and move. If Wikimedia, if Wikipedia moved, it's because so many others moved before. It's like the Dominos and it's literally a domino effect going in each and every possible direction. I heard this story, I don't know if I can say that publicly, of some venture capitalists investing in many startups in the Silicon Valley that got convinced himself and made phone calls to the people who was funding saying come on, this is your shit, this is your business that is at stake, do something about it and participate in this. So we cannot imagine the range of organizations and individuals who participated in that. From the ones we know very well, the EFFs, the public knowledge, the coalition for the future that just emerged out of this, to the ones we don't know, to all the individuals who took their guitars and played this, the day the Lolcats died, videos and things like that, that's the sum of all of this. Seriously, one in something million phone calls to the CNAH, you think it would be only Wikipedia? Hey, this is me again. Thank you for this great presentation. I want to talk a little bit about something different. What you're mentioning is actually a conflict in culture. I see it as a conflict in culture. We have this conflict going on that the Internet is seen as a commercial tool by most of the people who make the decisions who are put in place by us. And for us, it's actually culture. So one thing I see really necessary is that we try to give explicit declaration of this culture and try to persuade and push our utopias of what the Internet is and what it is all about into public consciousness. So it's not only about killing Akta right now. Of course, it's the first thing we have to do. But later on, I think we should all think about how can we dissipate this idea of culture we have? How can we dissipate this idea of culture as broad and as wide as possible? Your Internet is showing. Well, yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think that there is no better way of achieving this than by using the Internet for what it is. I mean, the Internet is not Facebook. It's not Google. It's not Apple, right? The Internet is these thousands of blogs, is those thousands of IRC channels, is those thousands of memes and images, whichever medium is conveying them that are going dozens of times around the world. All this we create when we work towards the common objective such as killing Soapar, Pipa and Akta is really teaching the world about the Internet and about what the Internet is about. And I agree with you. And I hope I made it clear enough. Kicking Akta's ass in the European Parliament is a crucial victory because it will be of global scale. Because beyond the question of copyright, Kicking Akta would avoid that we create an Akta precedent when some governments could just gather around the table and decide that those international institutions do not really go the way they would like them to go, that those parliaments are too complicated to deal with, and just decide repressive policies together. So it is also important for that that we kick Akta. But in the end, the objective is to change society as a whole. That people who just use Facebook because they don't know what the Internet is about come to realize that Facebook is the modern equivalent of a TV that just collects all your life. That when Orwell wrote about Big Brother, he didn't invent something going as far into our privacy as Facebook. Everyone has to understand that. But I want to tell you this anecdote. Is that on a previous copyright fight we had in France, the Datsy Lo, the EUCD transposition, in 2005 and 2006, the rapporteur was a guy called Christian Vanest, who is on the right of the right of the right wing party, who is really, well, he was the first to acknowledge guilty of the new homophobia, not crime, but misdemeanor or whatever is under a crime in France. He's really a nasty guy. And I would never think I would hear something like that from this guy. When the Adopi debate began some years ago, he said publicly, well, you know, when I was working on the Datsy, I understood that something was happening. And I understood that from the fuyi creative, the creative chaos. I knew that something was happening. This guy was the most conservative, almost fascist people ever. And he was praising chaos as something that made him understand the real cultural diversity, the real social diversity, what the internet was really about. So I think that it is when we fight for it that we really demonstrate what the internet is all about. And if there are people around here from the Arab countries who recently uprooted, I think they won't deny that. See, there are more questions. There must be. What, no time for more questions? Oh, please, just one. Okay. So no more questions. Let's finish the discussion around drinks. Thank you very much.
 Hi everyone, thank you for being here. I'm Jeremy Zimemann, I'm the co-founder and spokesperson  of Lacroix-Draitur-Junette, we're a citizen organization defending fundamental freedoms  online, you may know about our work. We are building a kind of citizen toolbox to help  everyone understand what is going on when our freedoms online are attacked and tools  to help everybody participate in the debate. We've been mostly busy in the last three years  kicking Acta's ass, you may have heard of it, but the job is not done yet and this is  partly what I'm going to tell you tonight. I come here with kind of bad news, then kind  of good news and a little bit of a plan. The bad news is that there's a war going on, you  may be aware of that, this war is the war against sharing. Those copyright industries  have been waging it for the last 15 years, they've been trying to push all the representative  measures you've heard about from the DMCA in the US to the EU CD and the IPRED in the  EU and various national transposition of all of this. It's all clear to all of you,  you've seen the strategy from suing the individuals to trying to automatize the suing, corrupting  governments to install some administrative authorities that would bypass the judicial  like the French case. Well, this is so over, this is so prehistory. The strategy right  now is to push enforcement at the very heart of the network. How many among you have read  at least one version of Acta? The final one. That's much more than the average, I may  be more or less familiar with this principle that Acta pushes for a cooperation, when I'm  using the air quote it means I'm quoting bits of it. It's pushing for cooperative efforts  between the ISPs, the service providers, the YouTube, the Emotions, the Facebooks of this  world, but as well the access providers, the Vodafone, the Orange, Deutsche Leicombe and  so on and so on. A collaboration between those ISPs on one hand and the copyright industry  on the other hand. The point of that collaboration is to impose measures or remedies to deter  further infringement. So it sounds quite harmless when you look at it, but when you think about  it with a technical mind, measures to deter further infringement can only amount in technical  terms to automated blocking of content, blocking of access to content, filtering of communication  and discrimination between those communications or automated removal of content. All of which  you would recognize amount to the very equivalent with the kind of censorship that is being done  for political purposes in some not so friendly and not so democratic countries. The bad news  is that by pushing enforcement at the very heart of the network, we may be about to make  a step that will be impossible to go backwards. By programming machines at the heart of the  network to decide what has to go through and what cannot go through, we will pave the way  to the generalization of the deployment of the very same machines that are used on one  hand by the dictators to censor content and spy on their populations and on the other  hand on telecoms operators to restrict their users' communications in the name of creating  new business models by hurting net neutrality. Once we've done that for copyright, there's  no way we go backwards. So the bad news is that this war against sharing is taking a  turn as of today that may be very much decisive for the future of the internet as we know  it. What is at stake here is the very architecture of a free, open, decentralized and universal  internet. The internet we love and care about is what it is because of this architecture.  Architecture matters. And the very characteristics of this architecture is that the internet  we love and share is decentralized. It is universal. This universality means that everyone  accessing a free internet has access to the very same content, service and applications,  but also has the ability to publish some. You know that this is how you invent stuff.  This is how you experiment. This is how you deploy something. This is how you create startups.  This is how you invent. This is how you remix. This is how you mash up. This is how we share.  It is because of the very universality of this architecture that we call the internet,  that we're about to maybe change our societies, that we're about maybe to change ourselves  and become better persons if it remains that way. Well, by its universality, a free internet  is what economists would call a common good. It is universal. Therefore, we all share it.  We all own it. It would be a mistake to acknowledge that the people running the wires are the  people who run the internet, who own the internet, sorry, that the people who run the routers  are the people who own the internet, that the people who manufacture those terminals  that enslave you into proprietary software, hell, and close chips are the ones who own  the internet. No. The internet as the aggregate of our intelligences is a common good. We  all own it. We all have our share in it, even if we're using Facebook or whatever, rather  centralized bullshit there is out there. And as a common good, we commonly own it, which  means that we have a responsibility over it. We have a responsibility to deliver to the  next generation the very same tool we had between our hands to become better persons  and to change our society. This is one of the greatest responsibilities we've had. This  is probably one of the most important challenges our generations have to face. And you know  probably as well as I do that if we do not manage to maintain this universal architecture  as it is, all the other global issues that are at stake, whether they're environment,  finance, energy, or whatever, will be so much more difficult to solve in a way that would  represent us, that would represent the general interest. But you probably all know that already  because you're here in Republica, right? So that was the sad news. The good news is that  there is something we can do about it. And that we have evidence of that. You've all  witnessed the sopa and pipa fight in the US. Some of all may actually believe that this  was a fight in the US. But most of us know that it wasn't. It's not the US citizens alone  who kicked sopa and pipa out of the Senate and the Congress. It's the whole Internet.  It is us. It is every one of us. I mean, we turned the website, we blacked out a website  for sopa and pipa because we thought it was mostly the same thing as ACTA. But I guess  that many of you did the same. Many of you blogged about sopa and pipa in your own language,  retweeted, retweeted. We were all part of it. The Internet, the universal and free Internet  kicked sopa and pipa's ass. And that's something. And that's evidence for everyone who will  tell you, oh, there's nothing we can do about that. It's over. We cannot fight it. And so  now it's wrong. And look at ACTA. Who here didn't never heard about ACTA? Who have never  heard about ACTA? Nobody. Nobody. One year ago, the answer would have been the total  opposite. We've been working and when I say, it's not only the quadrature of the net, many  people around here, once again, all of us, we worked for that. The whole Internet went  on fire when the European executive, with all its arrogance, signed this thing a very  few days after the seizure of mega-upload by the FBI. The whole Internet turned on fire.  It's not only the EU. And once again, we achieved something incredible. We literally turned  the European Parliament over. Well, we may be about to do so. And that's one of the,  maybe the sad part in the good news is that we may be about to win about ACTA in the European  Parliament, but it's not won yet. And if at one single stage we lower our guard, then  we may lose it. So let's not be overconfident about it. But right now, as of today in the  European Parliament, you can feel the delicate smell, the delicate scent of victory in the  air because so many more people understand the importance of ACTA, the importance of  these issues for the future of our societies, for the future of the free Internet, and for  the future of copyright. So we achieved something tremendous and we have to confirm that. We  have to win this ACTA battle in the European Parliament, period. And we know how to do  this. We know how to do this because we've been doing that for some times. We have to  be there at each and every step, all the boring steps in the procedure of the European Parliament.  And we may have an occasion to talk about it in the Q&A or later with some drinks. Five  committees working on a report, the report being presented in plenary a yes or no vote.  The vote will be around the summer. You'll hear about it again soon. We have to be present  and active and not lower our guard at each and every step. And we must win this ACTA  battle in the European Parliament. But even more importantly than that, we have to keep  the eyes on the price. If ACTA is just pushed away and nobody cares, well, this may not  happen. Then an ACTA 2 will come back. An ACTA 2 may start being negotiated. The day  ACTA is kicked into the European Parliament. And an ACTA 3 and an ACTA 4 and I have prayed  12 may come one after another as they stacked up for the last 15 years. With the tremendous  momentum we are achieving at the moment, we have a responsibility to do something more  about it. I think that it is time that we literally put an end to this absurd and dangerous  war against sharing. They are feeding us with lies. They are feeding the elected representatives  with lies. They are telling that whenever one of these industries loses some money, it is  because of the culture enthusiasts who share digital files between them with no intent of  profit. And we all know this is wrong. I mean, the French ad-op, the Three Strikes Authority,  demonstrated in its own study that people who do the more file sharing are people who  spend the more for culture. So many independent academic studies prove the same. All of us  here do file sharing maybe since Napster existed. And all of us know that the more you get access  to culture, the more cultivated you get, the more culture matters to you, the more you  will go to concerts, to theater, to movies, the more you will buy books. It is exactly  the same thing as the people going in the libraries, borrowing the more books in the  libraries being the people who buy the more books. We all know that, right? Well, then  we must turn that into public policy. So those industries stop attacking the very essence,  the very fabric, the very architecture of what makes our free Internet so great. And  there is a very simple solution for that. It's called the limitations and exceptions  to copyright. It's called fair use. This is the bit of the law where the author doesn't  have his or her word. This is part of copyright. These are parts that are excluded from copyright.  These are parts that are of general interest. When you want to show a movie to a classroom,  you do not have to ask for permission because education is of higher social value than copyright.  When you lend a book to a friend, you don't ask for permission because lending and friends  and sharing is more important than copyright. And it couldn't be enforced anyway. When you  create a parody of the work, you don't have to ask for permission. You just do it because  a parody is essential for freedom of speech, which is essential for democratic participation  that is indeed more important than copyright. Well, sharing of culture is just the same.  And we have to shout it loud and clear. We have to make evident. And we have to stand  for it. We have to turn the sharing of files between individuals and not for profit into  an exception to copyright. And then we will ultimately shut the mouth of those industries  who will go counter to our fundamental freedoms online and counter to the most precious tool  we have between our hands for improving the world we live in. So that's the plan. And  now you ask me, how do we get there? You ask me. Thank you. The answer is partly I don't  know. And partly I got a bit of a clue. There is this 2001 slash 29 directive in the EU.  It was supposed to harmonize copyright, but didn't harmonize anything. It is a failure  on all regard. And the two studies that landed on the commission's desk said the same. So  as the commissioner, the French commissioner, Michel Barnier, is announcing that he will  maybe and it will get more complicated if we kick actors out, revise this IPRED, the  enforcement directive. We must be louder than him in asking that the EU city, the 2001 slash  29, be reopened and that exceptions be renegotiated and that all rights as the public and that  all right to share culture be integrated and made into the EU law. I have the impression  that this is something we can achieve. And how do we do that? Well, first of all, we  look at what we did. We look at what we did with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA and we ask ourselves  how to do it better. What we did was to use every single node of the decentralized internet  for what it was or for what it wasn't, for what we hadn't think it was, is to use every  single word we had in our minds to make it loud and clear that those things had to be  kicked out is to use every single pixel that we found available online and turn it into  something else that was conveying a message. It's to go and talk to every possible community  from the development people for access to medication in Africa to the AIDS patients  and gay rights people to the farmers sharing seeds to some artists to the standard human  rights organizations to journalists to outreach everywhere and we have to convey this message.  This is our responsibility to care about this free internet and to protect it from those  interests that want to turn it into some television 5.0. We have to do it because we understand  what it is about. We have to do it because as we understand what it is about and as this  is a common good that we own and share collectively and as this is a battle that we have an occasion  to win, well we just cannot afford to lose that one. Thank you very much.  And this is where I hope there will be comments, trolls and questions. I see a hand here. Oh,  maybe it's simple if you come and line in the middle.  Hi Jeremy. I've seen you giving these talks like 2009, 2010, 2011 and now and you always  pretend we all can do something but actually all it took was Wikipedia going down for a  day. So I think it's not about all of us, it's about the big players. I'm sorry I have  to disagree with that. I know a bit how it is to deal with the people from the Wikimedia  Foundation. There are very heavy structures now, they have a lot of inertia, they're consensus  based and it's very difficult to make them take positions and move. If Wikimedia, if  Wikipedia moved, it's because so many others moved before. It's like the Dominos and it's  literally a domino effect going in each and every possible direction. I heard this story,  I don't know if I can say that publicly, of some venture capitalists investing in many  startups in the Silicon Valley that got convinced himself and made phone calls to the people  who was funding saying come on, this is your shit, this is your business that is at stake,  do something about it and participate in this. So we cannot imagine the range of organizations  and individuals who participated in that. From the ones we know very well, the EFFs,  the public knowledge, the coalition for the future that just emerged out of this, to the  ones we don't know, to all the individuals who took their guitars and played this, the  day the Lolcats died, videos and things like that, that's the sum of all of this. Seriously,  one in something million phone calls to the CNAH, you think it would be only Wikipedia?  Hey, this is me again. Thank you for this great presentation. I want to talk a little  bit about something different. What you're mentioning is actually a conflict in culture.  I see it as a conflict in culture. We have this conflict going on that the Internet is  seen as a commercial tool by most of the people who make the decisions who are put in place  by us. And for us, it's actually culture. So one thing I see really necessary is that  we try to give explicit declaration of this culture and try to persuade and push our utopias  of what the Internet is and what it is all about into public consciousness. So it's not  only about killing Akta right now. Of course, it's the first thing we have to do. But later  on, I think we should all think about how can we dissipate this idea of culture we have?  How can we dissipate this idea of culture as broad and as wide as possible?  Your Internet is showing. Well, yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think that there is  no better way of achieving this than by using the Internet for what it is. I mean, the Internet  is not Facebook. It's not Google. It's not Apple, right? The Internet is these thousands  of blogs, is those thousands of IRC channels, is those thousands of memes and images, whichever  medium is conveying them that are going dozens of times around the world. All this we create  when we work towards the common objective such as killing Soapar, Pipa and Akta is really  teaching the world about the Internet and about what the Internet is about. And I agree  with you. And I hope I made it clear enough. Kicking Akta's ass in the European Parliament  is a crucial victory because it will be of global scale. Because beyond the question  of copyright, Kicking Akta would avoid that we create an Akta precedent when some governments  could just gather around the table and decide that those international institutions do not  really go the way they would like them to go, that those parliaments are too complicated  to deal with, and just decide repressive policies together. So it is also important for that  that we kick Akta. But in the end, the objective is to change society as a whole. That people  who just use Facebook because they don't know what the Internet is about come to realize  that Facebook is the modern equivalent of a TV that just collects all your life. That  when Orwell wrote about Big Brother, he didn't invent something going as far into our privacy  as Facebook. Everyone has to understand that. But I want to tell you this anecdote. Is that  on a previous copyright fight we had in France, the Datsy Lo, the EUCD transposition, in 2005  and 2006, the rapporteur was a guy called Christian Vanest, who is on the right of the  right of the right wing party, who is really, well, he was the first to acknowledge guilty  of the new homophobia, not crime, but misdemeanor or whatever is under a crime in France. He's  really a nasty guy. And I would never think I would hear something like that from this  guy. When the Adopi debate began some years ago, he said publicly, well, you know, when  I was working on the Datsy, I understood that something was happening. And I understood  that from the fuyi creative, the creative chaos. I knew that something was happening.  This guy was the most conservative, almost fascist people ever. And he was praising chaos  as something that made him understand the real cultural diversity, the real social diversity,  what the internet was really about. So I think that it is when we fight for it that we really  demonstrate what the internet is all about. And if there are people around here from the  Arab countries who recently uprooted, I think they won't deny that. See, there are more  questions. There must be. What, no time for more questions? Oh, please, just one. Okay.  So no more questions. Let's finish the discussion around drinks. Thank you very much.
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Hi everyone, thank you for being here. I'm Jeremy Zimemann, I'm the co-founder and spokesperson of Lacroix-Draitur-Junette, we're a citizen organization defending fundamental freedoms online, you may know about our work. We are building a kind of citizen toolbox to help everyone understand what is going on when our freedoms online are attacked and tools to help everybody participate in the debate. We've been mostly busy in the last three years kicking Acta's ass, you may have heard of it, but the job is not done yet and this is partly what I'm going to tell you tonight. I come here with kind of bad news, then kind of good news and a little bit of a plan. The bad news is that there's a war going on, you may be aware of that, this war is the war against sharing. Those copyright industries have been waging it for the last 15 years, they've been trying to push all the representative measures you've heard about from the DMCA in the US to the EU CD and the IPRED in the EU and various national transposition of all of this. It's all clear to all of you, you've seen the strategy from suing the individuals to trying to automatize the suing, corrupting governments to install some administrative authorities that would bypass the judicial like the French case. Well, this is so over, this is so prehistory. The strategy right now is to push enforcement at the very heart of the network. How many among you have read at least one version of Acta? The final one. That's much more than the average, I may be more or less familiar with this principle that Acta pushes for a cooperation, when I'm using the air quote it means I'm quoting bits of it. It's pushing for cooperative efforts between the ISPs, the service providers, the YouTube, the Emotions, the Facebooks of this world, but as well the access providers, the Vodafone, the Orange, Deutsche Leicombe and so on and so on. A collaboration between those ISPs on one hand and the copyright industry on the other hand. The point of that collaboration is to impose measures or remedies to deter further infringement. So it sounds quite harmless when you look at it, but when you think about it with a technical mind, measures to deter further infringement can only amount in technical terms to automated blocking of content, blocking of access to content, filtering of communication and discrimination between those communications or automated removal of content. All of which you would recognize amount to the very equivalent with the kind of censorship that is being done for political purposes in some not so friendly and not so democratic countries. The bad news is that by pushing enforcement at the very heart of the network, we may be about to make a step that will be impossible to go backwards. By programming machines at the heart of the network to decide what has to go through and what cannot go through, we will pave the way to the generalization of the deployment of the very same machines that are used on one hand by the dictators to censor content and spy on their populations and on the other hand on telecoms operators to restrict their users' communications in the name of creating new business models by hurting net neutrality. Once we've done that for copyright, there's no way we go backwards. So the bad news is that this war against sharing is taking a turn as of today that may be very much decisive for the future of the internet as we know it. What is at stake here is the very architecture of a free, open, decentralized and universal internet. The internet we love and care about is what it is because of this architecture. Architecture matters. And the very characteristics of this architecture is that the internet we love and share is decentralized. It is universal. This universality means that everyone accessing a free internet has access to the very same content, service and applications, but also has the ability to publish some. You know that this is how you invent stuff. This is how you experiment. This is how you deploy something. This is how you create startups. This is how you invent. This is how you remix. This is how you mash up. This is how we share. It is because of the very universality of this architecture that we call the internet, that we're about to maybe change our societies, that we're about maybe to change ourselves and become better persons if it remains that way. Well, by its universality, a free internet is what economists would call a common good. It is universal. Therefore, we all share it. We all own it. It would be a mistake to acknowledge that the people running the wires are the people who run the internet, who own the internet, sorry, that the people who run the routers are the people who own the internet, that the people who manufacture those terminals that enslave you into proprietary software, hell, and close chips are the ones who own the internet. No. The internet as the aggregate of our intelligences is a common good. We all own it. We all have our share in it, even if we're using Facebook or whatever, rather centralized bullshit there is out there. And as a common good, we commonly own it, which means that we have a responsibility over it. We have a responsibility to deliver to the next generation the very same tool we had between our hands to become better persons and to change our society. This is one of the greatest responsibilities we've had. This is probably one of the most important challenges our generations have to face. And you know probably as well as I do that if we do not manage to maintain this universal architecture as it is, all the other global issues that are at stake, whether they're environment, finance, energy, or whatever, will be so much more difficult to solve in a way that would represent us, that would represent the general interest. But you probably all know that already because you're here in Republica, right? So that was the sad news. The good news is that there is something we can do about it. And that we have evidence of that. You've all witnessed the sopa and pipa fight in the US. Some of all may actually believe that this was a fight in the US. But most of us know that it wasn't. It's not the US citizens alone who kicked sopa and pipa out of the Senate and the Congress. It's the whole Internet. It is us. It is every one of us. I mean, we turned the website, we blacked out a website for sopa and pipa because we thought it was mostly the same thing as ACTA. But I guess that many of you did the same. Many of you blogged about sopa and pipa in your own language, retweeted, retweeted. We were all part of it. The Internet, the universal and free Internet kicked sopa and pipa's ass. And that's something. And that's evidence for everyone who will tell you, oh, there's nothing we can do about that. It's over. We cannot fight it. And so now it's wrong. And look at ACTA. Who here didn't never heard about ACTA? Who have never heard about ACTA? Nobody. Nobody. One year ago, the answer would have been the total opposite. We've been working and when I say, it's not only the quadrature of the net, many people around here, once again, all of us, we worked for that. The whole Internet went on fire when the European executive, with all its arrogance, signed this thing a very few days after the seizure of mega-upload by the FBI. The whole Internet turned on fire. It's not only the EU. And once again, we achieved something incredible. We literally turned the European Parliament over. Well, we may be about to do so. And that's one of the, maybe the sad part in the good news is that we may be about to win about ACTA in the European Parliament, but it's not won yet. And if at one single stage we lower our guard, then we may lose it. So let's not be overconfident about it. But right now, as of today in the European Parliament, you can feel the delicate smell, the delicate scent of victory in the air because so many more people understand the importance of ACTA, the importance of these issues for the future of our societies, for the future of the free Internet, and for the future of copyright. So we achieved something tremendous and we have to confirm that. We have to win this ACTA battle in the European Parliament, period. And we know how to do this. We know how to do this because we've been doing that for some times. We have to be there at each and every step, all the boring steps in the procedure of the European Parliament. And we may have an occasion to talk about it in the Q&A or later with some drinks. Five committees working on a report, the report being presented in plenary a yes or no vote. The vote will be around the summer. You'll hear about it again soon. We have to be present and active and not lower our guard at each and every step. And we must win this ACTA battle in the European Parliament. But even more importantly than that, we have to keep the eyes on the price. If ACTA is just pushed away and nobody cares, well, this may not happen. Then an ACTA 2 will come back. An ACTA 2 may start being negotiated. The day ACTA is kicked into the European Parliament. And an ACTA 3 and an ACTA 4 and I have prayed 12 may come one after another as they stacked up for the last 15 years. With the tremendous momentum we are achieving at the moment, we have a responsibility to do something more about it. I think that it is time that we literally put an end to this absurd and dangerous war against sharing. They are feeding us with lies. They are feeding the elected representatives with lies. They are telling that whenever one of these industries loses some money, it is because of the culture enthusiasts who share digital files between them with no intent of profit. And we all know this is wrong. I mean, the French ad-op, the Three Strikes Authority, demonstrated in its own study that people who do the more file sharing are people who spend the more for culture. So many independent academic studies prove the same. All of us here do file sharing maybe since Napster existed. And all of us know that the more you get access to culture, the more cultivated you get, the more culture matters to you, the more you will go to concerts, to theater, to movies, the more you will buy books. It is exactly the same thing as the people going in the libraries, borrowing the more books in the libraries being the people who buy the more books. We all know that, right? Well, then we must turn that into public policy. So those industries stop attacking the very essence, the very fabric, the very architecture of what makes our free Internet so great. And there is a very simple solution for that. It's called the limitations and exceptions to copyright. It's called fair use. This is the bit of the law where the author doesn't have his or her word. This is part of copyright. These are parts that are excluded from copyright. These are parts that are of general interest. When you want to show a movie to a classroom, you do not have to ask for permission because education is of higher social value than copyright. When you lend a book to a friend, you don't ask for permission because lending and friends and sharing is more important than copyright. And it couldn't be enforced anyway. When you create a parody of the work, you don't have to ask for permission. You just do it because a parody is essential for freedom of speech, which is essential for democratic participation that is indeed more important than copyright. Well, sharing of culture is just the same. And we have to shout it loud and clear. We have to make evident. And we have to stand for it. We have to turn the sharing of files between individuals and not for profit into an exception to copyright. And then we will ultimately shut the mouth of those industries who will go counter to our fundamental freedoms online and counter to the most precious tool we have between our hands for improving the world we live in. So that's the plan. And now you ask me, how do we get there? You ask me. Thank you. The answer is partly I don't know. And partly I got a bit of a clue. There is this 2001 slash 29 directive in the EU. It was supposed to harmonize copyright, but didn't harmonize anything. It is a failure on all regard. And the two studies that landed on the commission's desk said the same. So as the commissioner, the French commissioner, Michel Barnier, is announcing that he will maybe and it will get more complicated if we kick actors out, revise this IPRED, the enforcement directive. We must be louder than him in asking that the EU city, the 2001 slash 29, be reopened and that exceptions be renegotiated and that all rights as the public and that all right to share culture be integrated and made into the EU law. I have the impression that this is something we can achieve. And how do we do that? Well, first of all, we look at what we did. We look at what we did with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA and we ask ourselves how to do it better. What we did was to use every single node of the decentralized internet for what it was or for what it wasn't, for what we hadn't think it was, is to use every single word we had in our minds to make it loud and clear that those things had to be kicked out is to use every single pixel that we found available online and turn it into something else that was conveying a message. It's to go and talk to every possible community from the development people for access to medication in Africa to the AIDS patients and gay rights people to the farmers sharing seeds to some artists to the standard human rights organizations to journalists to outreach everywhere and we have to convey this message. This is our responsibility to care about this free internet and to protect it from those interests that want to turn it into some television 5.0. We have to do it because we understand what it is about. We have to do it because as we understand what it is about and as this is a common good that we own and share collectively and as this is a battle that we have an occasion to win, well we just cannot afford to lose that one. Thank you very much. And this is where I hope there will be comments, trolls and questions. I see a hand here. Oh, maybe it's simple if you come and line in the middle. Hi Jeremy. I've seen you giving these talks like 2009, 2010, 2011 and now and you always pretend we all can do something but actually all it took was Wikipedia going down for a day. So I think it's not about all of us, it's about the big players. I'm sorry I have to disagree with that. I know a bit how it is to deal with the people from the Wikimedia Foundation. There are very heavy structures now, they have a lot of inertia, they're consensus based and it's very difficult to make them take positions and move. If Wikimedia, if Wikipedia moved, it's because so many others moved before. It's like the Dominos and it's literally a domino effect going in each and every possible direction. I heard this story, I don't know if I can say that publicly, of some venture capitalists investing in many startups in the Silicon Valley that got convinced himself and made phone calls to the people who was funding saying come on, this is your shit, this is your business that is at stake, do something about it and participate in this. So we cannot imagine the range of organizations and individuals who participated in that. From the ones we know very well, the EFFs, the public knowledge, the coalition for the future that just emerged out of this, to the ones we don't know, to all the individuals who took their guitars and played this, the day the Lolcats died, videos and things like that, that's the sum of all of this. Seriously, one in something million phone calls to the CNAH, you think it would be only Wikipedia? Hey, this is me again. Thank you for this great presentation. I want to talk a little bit about something different. What you're mentioning is actually a conflict in culture. I see it as a conflict in culture. We have this conflict going on that the Internet is seen as a commercial tool by most of the people who make the decisions who are put in place by us. And for us, it's actually culture. So one thing I see really necessary is that we try to give explicit declaration of this culture and try to persuade and push our utopias of what the Internet is and what it is all about into public consciousness. So it's not only about killing Akta right now. Of course, it's the first thing we have to do. But later on, I think we should all think about how can we dissipate this idea of culture we have? How can we dissipate this idea of culture as broad and as wide as possible? Your Internet is showing. Well, yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think that there is no better way of achieving this than by using the Internet for what it is. I mean, the Internet is not Facebook. It's not Google. It's not Apple, right? The Internet is these thousands of blogs, is those thousands of IRC channels, is those thousands of memes and images, whichever medium is conveying them that are going dozens of times around the world. All this we create when we work towards the common objective such as killing Soapar, Pipa and Akta is really teaching the world about the Internet and about what the Internet is about. And I agree with you. And I hope I made it clear enough. Kicking Akta's ass in the European Parliament is a crucial victory because it will be of global scale. Because beyond the question of copyright, Kicking Akta would avoid that we create an Akta precedent when some governments could just gather around the table and decide that those international institutions do not really go the way they would like them to go, that those parliaments are too complicated to deal with, and just decide repressive policies together. So it is also important for that that we kick Akta. But in the end, the objective is to change society as a whole. That people who just use Facebook because they don't know what the Internet is about come to realize that Facebook is the modern equivalent of a TV that just collects all your life. That when Orwell wrote about Big Brother, he didn't invent something going as far into our privacy as Facebook. Everyone has to understand that. But I want to tell you this anecdote. Is that on a previous copyright fight we had in France, the Datsy Lo, the EUCD transposition, in 2005 and 2006, the rapporteur was a guy called Christian Vanest, who is on the right of the right of the right wing party, who is really, well, he was the first to acknowledge guilty of the new homophobia, not crime, but misdemeanor or whatever is under a crime in France. He's really a nasty guy. And I would never think I would hear something like that from this guy. When the Adopi debate began some years ago, he said publicly, well, you know, when I was working on the Datsy, I understood that something was happening. And I understood that from the fuyi creative, the creative chaos. I knew that something was happening. This guy was the most conservative, almost fascist people ever. And he was praising chaos as something that made him understand the real cultural diversity, the real social diversity, what the internet was really about. So I think that it is when we fight for it that we really demonstrate what the internet is all about. And if there are people around here from the Arab countries who recently uprooted, I think they won't deny that. See, there are more questions. There must be. What, no time for more questions? Oh, please, just one. Okay. So no more questions. Let's finish the discussion around drinks. Thank you very much.
Lacroix-Draitur-Junette, we're a citizen against sharing. Those copyright industries have US to the EU CD and the IPRED in the EU and democratic countries. The bad news is that by bad news is that this war against sharing is architecture of a free, open, decentralized and the importance of ACTA, the importance of these issues for the future of our societies, for the future of the free Internet, and for the future literally put an end to this absurd and dangerous How can we dissipate this idea of culture as just decide repressive policies together. So it that on a previous copyright fight we had in