From pavle@student.demon.nl Thu May 7 12:19 MET 1998 Date: Thu, 07 May 1998 12:23:34 +0200 From: Pavle Bojkovski To: Roger Wiesenbach , Christian Scherer , Daniele Bourcier , Rigo Wenning Subject: Update Dear friends, first let me apologize for my dissapearance from your radar screans. To be absolutely frank, the past few months have been the most hectic in my life - I'm trying to get a huge number of things done and I can't find time to get everything done. I have managed to get throught my first priority - my exams. As far as Legislatio (my site) is concerned, I've found myself in a morass of developments. As I informed you in Paris, the University of Amsterdam is interested in getting involved with the Legislatio project but the problem with that is that the university needs to decide in a number of committes before it can officially make up its mind. I've been trying to get the process rolling but I have yet to see any results. The legal front has grown quiet. The publishers have decided not to appeal the court's decision and they seem to be content to wait for the implementation of the Database Directive. As far as the directive is concerned, I have managed to draw the attention of the four major parties - they are atleast interested in hearing what I have to say. I am currently writing up a review of the database directive and I intend to send a copy of this review to all the major Dutch parties. It might be useful if I could add some foreign opinions to my review. (Rigo, it may be handy if we could get a German opinion in there. I know that professor Hoeren from Munster has an interesting opinion onthe directive.) Contributions from France and the rest of Europe would be helpful as well but I'm not sure where to start looking there. (Christian, maybe some of the people you're in touch with through the webeurope project can help). I guess that the most important aspects to pay attention to will be the legal and economical aspects of the directive. The legal aspects are rather clear but it may be interesting to see whether anyone out there has something interesting to contribute about the negative effects this will have on competition. Later on I intend to try and get in touch with some Euro-parlementarians in order to see whether there are any possibilities for action on the community level but we have to be realistic. The chances of getting the directive repealed aren't great. Our best option is to try and get the implementation of the directive swung more in our direction and to prevent the type of restriction we see in the directive from being generally accepted in other areas. I can reccomend the following web page: http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/more.html#rpt - it contains a number of relevan Americanmaterials on the protection of databases. The report on the legal protection of databases on the bottom of the page is very interesting. Now to the IT aspect of life, the universe and specifically our sites. I am currently trying to work out a new architecture for Legislatio. I'm being helped by a couple of people on a volunteer basis. The problem here is that you can't really apply a lot of pressure on the people so that the process isn't moving along too quickly. I've been thinking about the possibilities of XML as well. I see one real problem here and that is the amount of time that will be involved in moving our existing documents over into XML and also the added work involved in the creation of XML documents. I know that there are a couple of DTD's out there that were specifically made for the law and legal texts. The has been some interesting work doen by the Canadians. (I will try to find the URL of their site and send it to you later). Depending on he progress I make with my IT helpers I will attempt to launch a Dutch TGI sometime this coming autumn. This project is in an 'early idea' stage - I'll send more information as the project progresses. I hope that I'll be able to expand my site considerably before the summer and I'll let you know how the quest for materials goes. One last point I would like to raise is the idea of a conference. The idea has been mentioned a number of time before but I would like to give it a bit more substance here and now. My suggestion for the theme of the conference is: "The publication of legal materials on the internet: legal and technological barriers". We could hold the conference here in Amsterdam and invite people from the rest of Europe - from the independent/academic camp as well as from the governmental/commercial camp. I'd appreciate it if we could start working out the idea. I think that we could hold the conference by october/november. That's it for now from me. Regz. Pavle.