In this issue, M-commerce, Copyright exceptions, teaching cyberlaw, and the Open Rights Group do — Geeks at the Gates.

Wen Li (PhD student, Queen Mary) discussed the law, or lack thereof, of big money Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) in China. He’s still at an early stage in his research, but I can see that he is attempting to address a complicated trans-border issue.

Mansour (PhD Aberystwyth) on The E-Money Directive and MNOs: Why it all Went Wrong discussed why mobile (telephone) network operators have problems with the E-Money directive — mostly centred around why the directive doesn’t fit in with m-commerce and the regulatory difficulties there. We had a lively discussion afterwards, and I think that while the E-Money directive might not be the best fit, if MNOs are acting like banks by taking your money and using it to pay third parties (via top up credits), then they should be regulated *like one. (if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…)

The next session (that I went to) was centred around copyright exceptions. Mendis (Lancashire), discussed copyright issues for distance learning in education, namely the educational exceptions proposed in Gowers. Griffin, of the University of Reading, discussed Gowers and the Berne Three Step test, and Wang (Southampton) discussing fair use, file sharing, and education.

In interpreting Gowers, I think Griffin ran into the same problems that were discussed at the AHRC Centre’s talk on Gowers and Scotland; namely that the review isn’t very detailed and all the implications are not necessarily fully explored. This is particularly difficult when looking at such a large change as introducing an exception for “creative transformative or derivative works”.

I then sat in on a session on Education and 2nd gen e-learning. Quirk had some good thoughts on what to include in a Cyberlaw/Internet law/ E-commerce class, especially in the face of competition with other profs wanting to gobble up the areas that are ‘traditionally’ taught in this area (he called this the Pac Man effect). An example would be e-contracts increasingly being taught in regular contracts classes. Burkhard Schäfer, in his comments, took the opposite view saying that he was “running around the law school with chocolates on his head” trying to get everyone to eat as much as they can so that he could teach only the really cutting edge and interesting material.

Also in this session, Jones and Hoorn discussed their use of wikis in education. Jones noted that the students had a steeper learning curve than he would have thought. Having set up the wiki of the Personality Rights Database recently, I was wondering about the institutional aspects — was it difficult to get the Uni to agree to a wiki — and the practical legal bits — notice and take down policies, privacy issues, data protection. I’ll have to follow up with them further.

After it all, Becky Hogge gave an excellent overview of who the Open Rights Group are, what they do, and how they do it. As a result, I think that it has built up quite a bit of interest in the community and some more names for ORG-Law.

It was an interesting day — too many presentations that I want to see have been run concurrently. I’ll be following up with a post on day two and some expanded thoughts on some of the above sessions.

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