No subject

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.