their designers could not be sure whether they would face felony charges. These clauses would allow designers of DRM systems to have competitors prosecuted by claiming that these competitors' systems facilitated circumvention of DRMs. This would, in effect, create a new kind of intellectual property in addition to copyright and patents. However the purpose of the law was to protect the copyright of composers, artists, film-makers etc. and not grant new legal protections to DRM companies. These clauses would tie people to the provider of the music, since the DRM system of a music provider would only work with the players from this provider. This would in turn be an annoyance to customers, since content from one device would not be playable on another. The clauses would prevent investigation of possible security lapses in DRM systems, such as when Sony's Extended Copy Protection system was found to create computer security problems. Since the personal computing software industry in France is heavily dominated by a few companies (such as Microsoft and Apple Computer), which also provide DRM systems, it was feared that the law would reinforce these dominant positions and prevent competition from free software. Politicians across all French political parties have declared free software to be important for France, since it provides competition in a field dominated by extra-European corporations. It is officially considered instrumental in controlling the IT expenses of public administrations. Accordingly, a number of free software organizations (Free Software Foundation France, EUCD.info, Framasoft, APRIL, AFUL...) lobbied that the DADVSI law should not act as a de facto prohibition on making free software capable of reading formats protected by DRMs, including video and music, and thus making free operating systems unsuitable for personal use. They also noted that copyrighted works also include text, that formats such as PDF also have DRMs, and thus that the law could well exclude free software from desktop processing, since it could perhaps not read the same file formats as the main desktop suites. Those associations argued that criminal law should not reinforce network effects and the practice of tying sales (vente liée), that is, making it compulsory to buy one good or service to be able to buy another good of service, without a legitimate motive, which is prohibited by French law (Consumption code, L122-1). They argued that music and electronic equipment capable of playing it are separate products and that the