At the last meeting, I put myself down for the Action Item of finding out what current projects and campaigns were underway at organisations like FSFE, FFII, and FSF. The following is a summary of what I found on their websites.
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FSFE:
'How to get involved?' page: join fellowship, help maintain web site, help translate web site, staff tradeshow booths, do an internship with FSFE, make a financial donation.
'Events' page, current/future: Workshop in Egypt; Free Software exhibition in Germany; Free Society conference in Sweden.
'Projects' page: PDFreaders.org (promote use of Free programs for reading PDF files), Open Standards (promote interoperability and free access to the public record through use of open standards), European Commission Framework Programme (central EU mechanism for funding research projects; FSFE is supporting projects related to Free Software), 'Science, Technology and Civil Society' (provide assistance on Free Software aspects of promoting civil involvement in research), Freedom Task Force (help ensure compliance with Free Software licensing), Internet Governance Forum (FSFE follows the IGF to promote Free Software principles), DRM (campaign against DRM), IPRED2 (unclear what current status of this is), World Intellectual Property Organisation (FSFE is an Observer at WIPO, lobbying for freedom-friendly policy), software patents (this rumbles on).
FFII:
From action.ffii.org: software patents (in particular EPLA, a proposed
European Patent court system), IPRED2 (although other places have suggested this is stalled indefinitely, and Google News finds nothing for 'IPRED2').
FSF campaigns:
Lobbying against Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement --- proposed treaty which Europe might be party to. Might have side-effects interfering with Free Software (e.g., software to play media files).
'Defective By Design': campaigning against DRM.
OpenDocument: public documents should be in an open standard.
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Of these, nothing leaps out as demanding immediate and urgent attention, but a few things are on the go:
The threat of formalising swpats has not gone away, so I will try to find out (maybe Ciaran would know in fact) what the current status of this EPLA proposal is, and whether there's somewhere we can place our position on the record.
Open Standards could be another one --- we could go through the websites of the government depts and find which ones are offering documents only in Microsoft Word format (etc), and which are in Open Standards. (We'd have to decide how to classify PDF; personally I would say that since there exist free-software readers, it's OK, but I know there are other opinions.) Then write to them all, saying 'well done' or 'please fix' as appropriate. Has some local relevance, is fairly well parallelisable, and would yield some interesting data as well. Might even be a press release in it once it's done. I think this idea has been raised in the past.
The FSFE has a monthly newsletter. Maybe we should submit meeting reports, even if they're fairly short, formulaic, and content-free: 'Several Fellows met in Dublin at the IFSO meeting, to discuss matters of interest regarding Free Software in Ireland. Please see their web page if you're interested in joining them.'
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I'll report back again when I've had a chance to dig into the EPLA patent situation.
Ben.
Ben North ben@redfrontdoor.org writes:
The threat of formalising swpats has not gone away, so I will try to find out (maybe Ciaran would know in fact) what the current status of this EPLA proposal is, and whether there's somewhere we can place our position on the record.
The innovation taskforce is something that's active, Irish and worrying, but I haven't gotten to dig into it yet: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Ireland#Current_issues
AFAICT, the EPLA has been replaced by the UPLS: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_Patent_Litigation_System http://en.swpat.org/wiki/European_Patent_Litigation_Agreement
Same approach: keep the legislation, continue the EPO's practice of granting what it likes, and install a court with no accountability where the judges are chosen in such a way that they happen to come from the sections of the legal community that are pro-swpat and such that they are under the influence of the EPO.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, so if anyone has any good links/info that aren't there already, please add them.
The Bilski case (below) has kept me busy recently, so I'm a little out of the loop on what's happening with UPLS etc.
The EPO's inquiry "EBO G3/08" should be still ongoing (internally) about how to interpret the European Patent Convention's exclusion of software. I remember reading that there would be an oral hearing in Germany in October or November, and people who made submissions can attend but can't say anything - but when I went looking for the date now, I can't find anything.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/EPO_EBA_referral_G3-08
The EPO's response to the briefs has so far been limited to the publication of a brochure explaining that they don't grant software patents but CIIs :-/ http://www.epo.org/topics/issues/computer-implemented-inventions/software.ht...
There's also the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (in no way limited to counterfeiting!) which is being discussed by the world's richest countries plus a few others: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
This is very secretive, but wikileaks has a copy of one version.
And the Bilski case in the Supreme Court is closing its doors tomorrow for submissions. The Obama Administration chimed in in favour of software patents :-/ IBM told the court that software patents are what made free software thrive! etc. etc. The brief for End Software Patents will be put online shortly and is based on "Bilski brainstorming" plus the legal reasoning, updated, from last year's brief: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_brainstorming http://endsoftpatents.org/local--files/news/esp-bilski-final.pdf
Oh, and just something funny for anyone who read this far: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Microsoft#Gates.27_1991_memo
It's the full text of the memo by Bill Gates from 1991 about how software patents would bring industry to a standstill and be useful for extortion. At the end, Gates says:
"A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to software."
Given the dates, Gates seems to have be recommending this paper by rms :-) http://progfree.org/Patents/against-software-patents.html
Minister Conor Lenihan has just announced the innovation taskforce's report 'Delivering the Smart Economy': http://www.entemp.ie/press/2009/20091022.htm
The report itself should be on entemp.ie in a few hours and would be worth a skim or at least a grep for patents.
Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran@member.fsf.org writes:
The innovation taskforce is something that's active, Irish and worrying, but I haven't gotten to dig into it yet: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Ireland#Current_issues