Hi. Just wanted to let you know of a couple of things. Tell me if this is off-topic.
1.- Hague convention. http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/whatyoushouldknow.html I've been sent this. It seems that they are planning an agreement among 49 countries so that the jurisdictions are blurred and software patents, reverse engineering prohibitions, etc. legal in one country may be inforced in another.
2.- Spanish LSSI / European directive 2000/31 A proposed law in Spain (Ley de los Servicios de la Sociedad de la Información, LSSI) would allow the goverment to censor content in Internet (without asking a judge) and require registration prior to publication, forcing ISPs to keep historical logs and police the net. At lest according to the analysis of some people this vulnerates basic freedoms of speech, etc. This would probably make it more difficult to publish anything on the web, including free software. The uproar against this law is more about freedom of speech than free software, but free software is about freedom of speech, too. I've heard that there are similar laws in France and Italy (is this the same as the one forcing sottware distribution media to bear goverment produced identification labels?). They're all implementations of the 2000/31 directive, but the Spanish LSSI seems to go much further than the directive requires. Not that everybody likes the directive, either, but I'm told it is somewhat less serious than the LSSI. One of the groups against the proposed law is Kriptopolis: http://www.kriptopolis.com/lssi/index.html Others, like AI, propose modifications.