To avoid embarassment, Ireland will be implementing as many EU directives as possible before the end of December. Our implementation of the EUCD is a year late, so I suppose it would be a good candidate for quick implementation. The public draft hasn't been released yet.
The list of directives being implemented is at: http://www.entemp.ie/whats.htm
The "Information Society Directive" is probably the only one there that we'll be interested in. I've scanned it and found one problem so far:
It defines a "protection defeating device" as being one "which has only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any rights protection measure"
This sentence is ambiguous. does it mean: A) "limited commercially significant purpose or commercially significant use" B) "limited use or commercially significant purpose"
If A, useful non-commercially-significant software could be illegal.
I'll do more thinking about this for the thursday meeting, but we'll have to keep our eyes open for other fast-track directives, and we should assume that the EUCD will be fast-tracked (probably best to get a letter ready now, even though the public draft implementation isn't yet available.)