From EDRI-gram Newsletter:- see third and fifth paras and FFII comments.....
The European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee has adopted on 20 March
2007 the draft IPRED directive following the opinions presented by MEP
Nicola Zingaretti, with some important amendments though.
The good news is that the very controversial definition of "commercial
scale infringement", that previously included the IPRs (Intellectual
Property Rights) infringements by private users for personal use, was
detailed and now the text refers to a criminal infringement as "a deliberate
and conscious infringement of the intellectual property right for the
purpose of obtaining commercial advantage."
The patents and utility models have been excluded from the scope of the
directive. From the unexamined IPRs, design rights, database rights, and
possibly rights related to semiconductor topographies are still in.
The bad news is that definitions are kept vague, the Committee considering
that the European Court of Justice should interpret them.
The provision that criminalizes aiding and abetting or inciting to infringe
an intellectual property right was kept in the text, even though it was a
large consensus among the industry members (from open source software
supporters to major software companies lobbyists) that this text is an
important threat to every company in the software and the Internet industry.
Also, the recommendations made by Max Planck Institute and Chartered
Institute of Patent Agents regarding the necessary definitions in order to
clearly limit the directive to piracy cases, were not included in the
adopted report.
FFII warned even before the session that the Rapporteur failed to protect
the European industry and citizens. Pieter Hintjens, FFII president, said:
"The proposed text is an undetermined and shoddy draft which pleases only
one party, but will harm many others. The rapporteur failed to choose for
the European industry, and his last minute changes are making the situation
even worse. He had a year to fix this text but seems to be unable to work
out a sensible compromise. This sharply contrasts with the Industry
Committee's rapporteur David Hammerstein, who managed to obtain support from
all political groups for a fairly balanced text."
EU Weighs Copyright Law (20.03.2007)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129995/article.html
Criminal Sanctions Rapporteur fails to protect European industry
(19.03.2007)
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/Criminal_Sanctions_Rapporteur_fails_to…
EC leaves personal use out of criminal IP laws ( 22.03.2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/22/ec_ip_incite/
IPRED wiki - FFII
http://www.ipred.org/
EDRI-Gram: ENDitorial :Constitution by criminalisation (31.01.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.2/enditorial
From: "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve(a)fsfeurope.org>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:01:14 +0100
Subject: Raffle update (was: Re: 3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more
Fellows)
To: discussion(a)fsfeurope.org
Dear Fellows,
we have decided to take the following items out of the raffle
* 1 Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech
* 3 Developer Discount codes for Nokia N800 Internet Tablets, by Nokia
* 2 Free Software based routers KWGR614, by NETGEAR
and will pass them to developers for full liberation at a later stage.
FSFE sees its Fellows as a part of itself, as people with very strong
committment to freedom and strong ethics, who would always do the
right thing. We always assume honesty and strong principles.
This perception has been part of the Fellowship idea from the start
and is reflected in many details, like the -- from a minimum -- freely
chosen Fellowship contribution, which has never been checked.
Unfortunately this perception has clouded our vision to the potential
negative interpretation of putting these items into the raffle. We
were sure that if we pass these along to Fellows they would do the
right thing and work on liberating the devices with more freedom as
the logical consequence. But it seems that some people got the
impression we were simply distributing them as prizes. This would
amount to distribution of the devices with proprietary software for
usage, not liberation, and would be against our principles.
We have to admit that the communication allowed that conclusion, which
at the time seemed so remote to people in FSFE that we failed to
consider this interpretation enough. For this we apologise.
We obviously will not continue what we now see as a mistake, and
therefore we have decided to take these items out of the fellowship
raffle. They will be replaced by 15 copies of "Free Software, Free
Society" and the remaining items in the raffle will be raffled as
planned.
After the raffle is over, we will have a dedicated call to liberate
these devices where people can apply for them and they will be given
the devices under certain conditions. In setting this up we will pay
attention to the Fellows who have already applied to be allowed to
work on liberating the devices.
We hope that you will understand and support this decision, and that
you will continue to be a part of our work in the future.
With best regards,
Georg Greve
FSFE, President
----------
--
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org
1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
6. System administration murphy weeks
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
Making Free Software projects legally maintainable is increasingly
important. This includes maintaining the ability to relicence, ensure
licence compliance, and to ensure clean copyright.
FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment
carefully crafted to help Free Software projects consolidate their
copyright to a single organisation or person.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html
The FLA was originally developed and released in 2002 with a grant to
allow people use the agreement for their own purposes. FSFE has now
released a new revision of the FLA under the terms of both the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) license.
Project can choose to either apply to be part of FSFE's Fiduciary
Programme and make use of the legal network of the Freedom Task
Force or adapt the FLA to consolidate copyright into their own
organisation using their own legal experts.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.html
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
As it did in the past years, FSFE wants to thank all Fellows for their
support, which is essential in making its work possible. For this
purpose, several companies sponsored hardware and books of the 2007
Fellowship raffle, which will be held 1 April 2007. FSFE would like to
thank all the companies that donated the gadgets and is happy to pass
these gifts on to its supporters.
http://www.fsfe.org/rafflehttp://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000170.html
If you wish to become an essential part of all the activities of FSFE
and would also like to get your chance to win some of the many
gadgets, join the Fellowship now:
http://www.fsfe.org/join
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
Like the years before, the Free Software Foundation Europe was present
with a booth at FOSDEM, one of the biggest Free Software conferences
in Europe. This year, FSFE shared the booth with its Spanish
associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation.
Shane Coughlan presented the Freedom Task Force in a lightning talk,
and Georg Greve held the closing talk titled "Beyond GPLv3". An
amazing total number of twenty members and volunteers of FSFE shared
the work on the booth, answered questions, and talked to interested
people.
You can find some more information, some pictures and links to the
video recordings in the following blog entries:
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/life_after_fosdemhttp://fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/podcast_interviews_wi…
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
Ciarán O'Riordan represented FSFE at a computer science conference
named SkyCon. He spoke about GPLv3, presenting the current state and
the work ahead.
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
FSFE's first intern in FSFE's Zürich office and Freedom Task Force,
Maria Luisa Carli, had to go back to Italy just after FOSDEM to finish
her studies with an additional course. Marilu is planning to stay
involved in FSFE's activities, though.
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/mlc981/marilu_s_blog
6. System administration murphy weeks
February was a dark month of system administration at FSFE, starting
when one of its core servers going down due to a double hard disk crash
in the system RAID-1 array, followed by an almost simultaneous network
outage at the backup location, making all backups inaccessible.
This not only took down FSFE's main web site, but also that of our
Latin American sister, which we are supporting with a virtual
server. With some work we managed to get things back to operational
state on another machine, and will hopefully be able to bring the
crashed server back to life soon.
FSFE's infrastructure is mainly volunteer-organised, including the
Fellowship portal, the further evolution of which is mainly held back
by lack of administrator and developer time. If you wish to volunteer
to help on these issues and could maybe even see yourself getting
involved more deeply, please get in touch with either:
fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
system-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is a project to
develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free
educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards. It will
also try to fill this platform with some initial material. The
project is funded by the European Commission for a period of two
years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008.
http://www.selfproject.eu/
During the first half year, the focus was on the analysis of existing
material. Now, the implementation phase starts, both for the platform
(developed at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai)
and the conversion of existing material.
FSFE has set up a mailing list for coordination of FSFE's work:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self
There is also a general mailing list for the SELF project:
http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
So if the project sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the
mailing lists, and contribute to the work!
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
On April 1st (no joke), FSFE will hold by far its biggest Fellowship raffle
yet. The goal is to encourage more people to join the Fellowship, so we're
asking for your help spread the word. We've made some graphics if you'd
like to use them, and more general information is here:
http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/raffle/2007/raffle_2007
If you've been waiting for the right time to join the Fellowship, or if you
know people who value free software or intend to join but haven't gotten
around to it, now's a good time.
The prizes this year are:
* 1 Free Software Greenphone from Trolltech
* 2 Free Software based routers KWGR614, from NETGEAR
* 1 LinSoft BTP-PC amounting to 500 EUR, from linsoft.de
* 4 USB smart card readers SCR-335, compatible with the Fellowship
crypto card on all GNU/Linux distributions, from kernelconcepts.de
* 2 Omnikey PCMCIA CardMan 4040, compatible with the Fellowship crypto
card on all GNU/Linux distributions, from xtops.de
* 30 German books (among German speaking Fellows only), from linuxland.de
* 3 Developer Discount codes for Nokia N800 Internet Tablets from Nokia
NOTICE: special conditions apply to the N800 prizes, see:
http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/raffle/2007/special_conditions_for_nokia_n800
Everyone that is a Fellow on April 1st, new and old, will be included in the
raffle.
Since it's launch in February 2005, the Fellowship has been a great success.
It's enabled FSFE to interact more directly with the community, it's aided
the organising of local Fellowship meetings.
In recent years, mostly thanks to the financial support of the Fellowship,
FSFE has grown to include 5 full-time and 2 part-time staff doing GPL
enforcement, EU/UN/WIPO lobbying, GPLv3 awareness, volunteer coordination,
events, and media relations as well as national activities.
We want to grow the Fellowship to further increase the work that FSFE does.
Finally, we'd like to thank the hardware vendors who have donated the
prizes. FSFE is glad to see that hardware vendors see the importance
of a future without lock-in and dependency.
So please help spread the word: If anyone was waiting to join, now is the
time. Putting a logo on your webpages or forwarding a message to relevent
mailing lists would a good way to help FSFE.
And good luck to all the Fellows, new and old on April 1st!
--
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org