(I like the new logo!) For those of you back in Texas, EFF-Austin is having a meetup:

EFF Austin is renewing the practice of monthly supporter meetings.  The first in this series will be held at 7pm on Thursday, July 5th at Progress Coffee (see links below for maps and additional information).  This first meeting will feature a discussion with Will Hurley about the future of Open Source software.

Will Hurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software and the author of the recently launched but oft discussed “Opensville” blog.  “Whurley” has also been instrumental in bringing the BarCamp phenomenon to Austin.  At the upcoming meeting he will lead a discussion about the direction that the Open Source movement is headed, touching on the possible legal pitfalls recently posed to the community by Microsoft.

Please feel free to contact me for any further details regarding the event.  All members of the community are welcome, and we hope to see you there!

-Matt Buck, EFF Austin

Links to further information:

whurley’s “Opensville” blog – http://www.opensville.org/
Progress Coffee website – http://www.progresscoffee.com/home.html

EFF Austin website -  http://www.effaustin.org/

As a side note, for those of you that won’t be present (like myself), you can watch all the action over live video feeds on the net, available from the Texas Legislature Online homepage (for the main chamber) and committee meetings at the Senate and House sites.

March 14, 2007
4:30pm – 6:30pm
Austin History Center, 810 Guadalupe

http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/library/ahc/

Full details after the fold.

In this presentation, Jon Phillips, Community Developer for Creative Commons, discusses how Creative Commons enables legal sharing, reuse, and remix. Contemporary relevant topics will be discussed in relationship to artists, musicians and attorneys. Come with your questions as this session will be highly interactive and focused on synthesis.
www.creativecommons.org

Also featuring
Entertainment Lawyer Deena Kalai

http://deenakalai.com/

Attorney Ed Cavazos, Fish & Richardson, P.C.

http://www.fr.com/

For more informtion or to rsvp: rsvpcc at dcitexas.org

Presented by
EFF-Austin

http://effaustin.org

The Digital Convergence Initiative

http://dcitexas.org

I think it is a great project, and something like it should be implemented probably for most government agencies. Preserving the entire site is a great research tool.

UNT Cybercemetery Link.

He says the use of mediation in corporate and business matters has grown dramatically in Scotland in the past couple of years but believes there is “some catching up to do” when comparisons are made with the United States.

“Mediation should be about addressing issues up front, quickly, before they fester and become deep-seated”, Sturrock says. “The technique can reduce uncertainty, keep costs down and ensure that reputations are maintained.”

An initiative, launched this week by Core, aims to widen the role of alternate dispute resolution north of the Border.

Having participated in a few mediations, I wholeheartedly agree that they can greatly help with a wide variety of problems related to business disputes. My guess is, that if the US is more advanced than Scotland on this front, it is due in no small part to the generally more litigious culture on the western side of the Atlantic.

I don’t know the Scottish rules in this area, but some of the rules in Texas that help encourage mediation are:

• Courts can, and do, require mediation before cases can proceed to trial.
• Statements said during mediation are not admissible as evidence in court.
• Once an agreement has been reached, the agreement is enforceable in court.

I wonder if the relative lack of ADR in Scotland (assuming this is so) is in relation to legal policies or just general lack of knowledge (or some other reason)?

The costs of not doing some sort of ADR are quite high — the article mentions:

Research into the cost of disputes in business has found that the average bill for small companies is £75,000, with larger firms coughing up £500,000 or more. [ed note - looks like this is for all disputes]

The Gowers report in Recommendation 45 looks at this problem in the patent law context, and found that costs of patent disputes could be greatly reduced by the formation of a EU Patent Court:

Recommendation 45: Support the establishment of a single EU court to adjudicate cross-border IP disputes by promoting the European Patent Litigation Agreement.

Some numbers are in the report, if you are interested. I think that some sort of ADR should probably be built into the process of an EU-wide patent court (if needed), though I would be surprised if the big companies that get into these kind of large-scale patent disputes don’t already attempt mediation before bankrolling some Magic Circle firm’s increase in profits per partner for the year.

For a bit of background, Massachusetts has had a similar requirement in place for some time (2005). See this article for a bit more detail. The goal of open document requirements is usually twofold — to save money and to encourage access.

Saving money comes by preventing the State from getting locked in to a specific format. This gives the State the freedom to choose vendors of, for example, word processing programs based on price and not on the ubiquity of their proprietary format. For a concrete example, take Microsoft’s dominance with Word and its closed ‘.doc’ format. By closed, I mean (without going into too much detail) that non-Microsoft software has difficulty opening, writing, and saving the files. State agencies have little option but to use Word for their desktop computers — and consequently they must pay Microsoft licensing fees. Using a format for saving the file that everyone can use (an ‘open format’) encourages competition in the software to read, write, and save files.

States, like all governments, have a duty to ensure access to its documents by its citizens. Using one specific closed format, such as ‘.doc’, results in requiring to a certain extent that the public must use the same program (Word) in order to read the files. Word can be expensive, and requiring its use can be a hurdle. In addition, the State has a duty to archive their information. If they use a format that only one company can read, it can be difficult or cost-prohibitive to ensure access to the public when that format becomes outdated.

The nice thing about requiring open document formats is that there exists an open source solution for word processing — Open Office, or for those of you on a Mac (like me) NeoOffice. These programs are free (as in ‘free beer’) to download and use, and (IMO) match the functionality of Word and other similar word processing programs. They by default save in open formats so that the docs may be accessed by other vendors.

For some implementation issues of these kind of requirements, see the following posts by Scott Brown regarding implementation of the Clean Government Amendment, which did not pass (for other reasons), in the City of Austin. [Link1] & [Link2].

I think that moving Texas to open formats is a great idea. Texas is a huge market, and hopefully that will trigger some moves towards openness in other states. Links regarding who is on the State Affairs committee and when they meet, after the fold.

The committee meets next Monday, but have not scheduled to discuss this bill (though of some interest to readers, they will discuss SB90 regarding email ballots for overseas military personnel).

Keep up with the action on the bill here.
Committee members and their websites:

• Sen. Robert Duncan
• Sen. Tommy Williams
• Sen. John Carona
• Sen. Rodney Ellis
• Sen. Troy Fraser
• Sen. Chris Harris
• Sen. Mike Jackson
• Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr.
• Sen. Leticia Van de Putte

Membership list here.

Committee meeting times are available here.

This Monday’s meeting announcement is here.

EFF-Austin General Meeting

Thursday, February 15, 2007
6:30PM at Café Caffeine, 909 West Mary

Speaker: Derek Woodgate
Net Neutrality vs Marketplace power

With the increasing use of traffic shaping by many or most broadband providers to control P2P and other services, together with the increasing market power and control of such providers through mega-mergers, we are witnessing a growing debate on how to protect consumer rights to net neutrality.

Born out of the concept of the “dumb network”, namely one that is engineered to simply deliver the bits, passing packets according to the needs of applications, “net neutrality” is about equal access to the internet, free from any interference or discriminatory restrictions on what kinds of equipment can be attached, how the equipment can communicate and it ensures that one set of communications is not degraded for the sake of another – an entirely neutral network.

Derek will discuss the marketplace, the legislative implications and how social change, new technologies and media/entertainment and communications services are fueling the debate in a way that could negatively redefine the future of the internet.