The French ”Constitutional Council” just decided about the DAVDSI law^[1] that:

• reverse engeneering a DRM is illegal, even if you try to port it to other platform respecting its limitations ;
• copying illegal stuff can lead to prison, whereas the governement motto was that prison for hackers should be avoided at any cost, and that gradual fines had to be used instead.

The opposition had made a formal request to the CC asking to reject the law, and they got one that is worse than the one proposed by the government. One that is maybe even worse than the DMCA^[2].

OMFFSM…

The small benefit is that the point that said that authors who write softwares that can be used to exchange copyrighted contents has been softened (in fact restricted) a bit. But still remains, which in itself still is a nightmare.

(for the non french-speaking people, the picture says “this man whistle music without paying it”)

"NMUs are not an excuse to get random pet bug fixes in."

Obviously not !

NMU are meant to fix bugs (what is a pet bug btw ?) especially the old with trivial merged-upstream patches (not to mention the 2 month old security problems).