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Adrian Midgley wrote:
Nothing against the rest of the Peninsula, just don't know their MPs.
Did you see Ben on TV today - interesting interview - I assume it is all end of the year interviews as I was concentrating on washing up at the beginning of it. I think many issues are handled in other groups - AFFS. Public Domain Protection. One thing I am unclear on is whether under the EU database legislation collections of Public Domain information have protection. In the US, much to the disgust of people who publish collections of legal judgements (legal judgements are part of the public record, and thus in the public domain), merely collating, indexing, and otherwise routine manipulating of public domain information (no matter how hard the labour - I guess that is labor since we are in the US) is not sufficiently creative to endow the derivative work with copyright protection. This approach safe guards the public domain which is in danger of being eroded through being collated, and computerised, when in fact it should become richer and more accessible in the information age, in my opinion. Strangely this issue came to the for in Chess games, okay maybe not a central issue to other peoples lives but the principal remains. In chess, where, if we accept the moves are public domain (questionable according to some - who hold it is a joint creative endeavour), people behave as if they have rights on the collection. Nobody disputes annotated games (like commentary on legal judgements, this is copyrightable), and it is only an issue if you want to publish your collection. No one has yet refused me rights to redistribute their collection, but I don't think I should have to ask. This is a grey area legally. Government Software - what should Crown Copyright convey I think the public domain is not the place for software, the GPL provides the right safe guards IMHO, but I appreciate others disagree vehemently on this issue. The US Federal Government was (at least once upon a time) of the view that software written by Federal employees in the performance of their duties clearly should belong to the US people as a collective, and not to the department in question. So quite a lot of it appeared on the web. The essence of this view is what needs conveying to government, I think once grasped, that government employees are creating stuff that could be reused to make England richer. It is a short step from this to ensuring people other than the copyright holder do not unduely exploit this information for personal profit, or undermine the software authors work by building on it in a one sided fashion, to suggesting that the GPL (or similar arrangements) is an appropriate licence. I think once you create a culture of "freeing" government software, the idea of using free software in government will meet far less resistance (not that they don't use it a lot anyway, as it is often easier to "buy into" when starting small projects). Crown Copyright is fine, but most government departments don't advertise their software to other departments, so some simple arrangement or standard for placing it on the Internet, or even an Internet based government "forge". Trust me the UK Met Office had some very good mapping software, and related tools and datasets, which I dare say other bits of the MOD, DoE and no doubt other departments might have a use for if they knew they existed. On a small scale at the Met Office we increased software reuse through a small scheme, but the access was limited, and the tools for sharing were more limited than a modern source forge. It is not even clear to me that legislation is needed, as some Crown Copyright material is already widely available for reuse, although you often need the relevant director to approve the release. I don't think these ideas are alien to a party committed to "Open Government", and indeed are probably far less controversial, and so allows government to show rapid progress in "Open Government", without great effort, and a good choice of licence will mitigate most of the risks of such an approach. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.