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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Adrian Midgley wrote: > >>I believe only 2 of the 15 member countries of the EU have >>adopted the changes by the deadline specified. > > > It doesn't work that way. > > The EU law is law and applies to member states from the date > given. You said this before but I think you need to read the directive, as far as I can tell it establishes a duty on member states to establish legislation to meet a set of criteria (esp. under sanctions and remedies) by December 2002. The member states are required to establish a legal framework for rights holders to be able to pursue those taking particular actions. Presumably if the UK does not implement a legal framework that allows rights holders to pursue me for infringing a technical measure, that is an issue between the rights holder and the UK government (for failing to comply with the directive). The directive itself establishes no sanctions or remedies, gives no guidance as to extent or limitations of liability other than to state they should be; effective, proportionate and dissuasive, and gives no indication how such actions might be brough under the UK legal system. In fact from a purely legislative terms the directive doesn't even indicate whether the sanctions should disuade the rights holder or the infringer from further action. Lawyers would make terrible programmers I suspect. Certainly if a rights holder attempted to stop me from infringing a technical measure, there is no provision in UK criminal law to act under. Standing in a court of law saying "the UK government should have outlawed this by now" is going to be of limited value as a prosecution case I suspect. > The EC is quite pro open source, and some of the people working > in the relevant Directorate are hard and effective workers whom > I have met, so don't go overboard. I'm not sure what I might have been going overboard on. The EC isn't going to be regarded as pro freesoftware when the majority of proprietary data formats are protected from interoperability by copyright law. It might support Open Source models, but we'll be back to the current state with MP3, where every viewer for a format will have to pay licence fee to the creator, which will clearly cut very hard at the GNU GPL idea of giving copies of your software away. People in one room paying them to grow stuff, and people in the next room paying them to throw it away..... Simon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+fMR/GFXfHI9FVgYRArbvAKCsjYVdfuWnxo2Td2T4EZDXE/6nmgCeIuVA ZQzvTTDfyOdcGG6iXOamEdI= =abqK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.