[Fsfe-ie] A fresh and accessable source for information on swpats in EU

James Heald j.heald at ucl.ac.uk
Sun Nov 30 20:50:59 CET 2003


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Clarke" <ian at locut.us>
To: <fsfe-ie at fsfeurope.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 12:57 PM
Subject: [Fsfe-ie] A fresh and accessable source for information on swpats
in EU


> Sorry if I am treading on any toes here, but does anyone else feel that
> websites currently providing information on swpats in the EU are not as
> accessable as they could be?
>
> For example, http://swpat.ffii.org/ smacks of someone being a tad
> over-enthusiastic when it comes to what can be achieved with <div> tags
> and the "background-color" CSS attribute.  The result is a website that
> is rather off-putting IMHO.
>
> I would be willing to provide hosting on one of my (well connected and
> well adminstered) servers for a cleaner site, possibly based on some
> kind of user-editable CMS (<plug>such as
> http://quickcms.sf.net/</plug>).  It could include facilities such as a
> bug-tracker-style database for keeping track of efforts to persuade
> politicians and such-like.  Since I have root on the server I can
> install whatever is needed (within reason).
>
> Since I have a billion projects going on, someone else will need to
> undertake the grunt-work, but I could take care of everything up to
> having a domain pointed at an instance of QuickCMS, others could take it
> from there (adminstered via a user login on a debian box).
>
> Any takers?
>
> Ian.

To be fair to Hartmut, he has just moved the swpat.ffii.org site from HTML
3.2 to HTML 4.0, and chose a particularly gaudy stylesheet so he could check
that every mouseover and every click was being properly recognised.

The main shortcoming at the moment isn't so much webspace as good editorial
content.

Suggestions/improvements/rewrites for www.ffii.org.uk would be very welcome;
as would an FFII-IE site to give a specifically Irish perspective on the
campaign.

The reason http://swpat.ffii.org is seen as *the* site is the basically the
sheer amount of work that Hartmut has put in and continues to put in, and
that is what has made it the most central site in the campaign.  Good
suggestions on how to make it more user-friendly are surprisingly warmly
received -- there may even be a page for them, if anyone can find it.

Across Europe there are already a plethora of sites, see
http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/PatentInformationLeafletsLinks

of which
http://wiki.ael.be/
has a leading position, because it's the easiest to add new material onto

one of the best looking and most impressive is
http://www.softwarepatenter.dk/
but unfortunately I think it's almost all in Danish

and
http://patents.caliu.info/
is I think also quite an impressive model, although I'm not sure whether
Xavi is still updating it.


What I think is most needed is
(i)  a specifically Irish swpat site
(ii) thoughts about how best to put the issue over, which could be shared by
all the European campaigns.


All best,

   James.



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