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 <https://twitter.com/evallespi> *WIKIMEDIA FRANCE* Association pour le libre partage de la connaissance *www.wikimedia.fr <http://www.wikimedia.fr/>** @Wikimedia_Fr <https://twitter.com/Wikimedia_Fr>** <https://twitter.com/Wikimedia_Fr>* *40 rue de clery, **75002 Paris* <http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/691082430#map=19/48.86814/2.34683> _______________________________________________ Publicpolicy mailing list Publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/publicpolicy