Hi all,
Our meeting on Thursday was small, but productive. These are the minutes:
- Anti-piracy report
Cited by government, and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by
the Pirate Party. It claims that the increase in internet traffic is exactly
correlated with job loss (which sectors?)
- Copyright reform
The issue for us is that this will likely be driven by ACTA and the TPP, and
the above piracy report. This affects us because it may result in stronger
DRM and anti-circumvention laws, and other restrictions on the use of
hardware.
- TPP
Among other things, the TPP demands a copyright term of 95 years after the
date of publication. Some confusion here: currently, does the copyright term
start at the death of the author?
- Patent abolition ambassadors
We welcome Bill Appelbe, CEO of VPAC as a public voice against patents. We
discussed who else we could approach.
- Customer agreements
We discussed what sorts of things should go in an agreement with a client to
allow the developer to contribute code upstream in FOSS projects.
Alex couldn't
find any of these online. MFSIG could collaborate to create such an
agreement, and pool our resources to have it looked at by a lawyer. Then we
could post it on the Web for anyone to use.
Action items:
- Alex to write to Kim Weatherall to offer the help of MFSIG in campagning
against certain aspects of the TPP:
- Copyright term.
- Anti-circumvention of copy protection / "rights management".
- Patent "ever greening".
- Chris to contact Con Zymaris about Open Source Victoria (are they
still active?)
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