[Fsfe-ie] EU direcitves being rushed into Ireland before presidency

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

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.)

-- 
Ciaran O'Riordan - http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/