[ELECTRON] Fwd: [ok-scotland] Fwd: Barcamp Glasgow/in principle discussion

[Andrew Back]

On (09:58 13/06/10), Paola Di Maio wrote:
> One more v quick thing, for the record only:
> 
> 
>  by suggesting a lawyer i was not thinking 'litigation', but should the
> 'culture' message not
> get anywhere,  lawyers tend to be able to find the right arguments (in this
> case the de facto trademark argument)

In my experience, you are extremely fortunate if you can find a lawyer that
is willing to take on your cause unless it is precisely their specific area
of law and you are a paying client. Even when lawyer friends have offered
advice - e.g. on dealing with a landlord that has decided they are entitled
to keep a deposit because it looks like someone may have actually lived in
their property - it has been under the condition that their name is kept out
of the matter.

I'm sure there will be a relevant code of practice etc. 
 
> I agree there are too few decent lawyers around (and one of the reasons why
> I will continue to study jurisprudence, to defend
> myself from bad /would be lawyers all around the world)

You need to find a lawyer that is passionate about Barcamps, or maybe even
just open source, creative commons or open data etc. I.e. someone who is
more likely to be attuned to the cause.

FWIW, I reckon you'd have a hard time defending Barcamp when its loosely
defined and not registered, unless you, say, got the originators and some
interested legal types behind the cause. Of course, IANAL. 

If you are determined to see that Barcamp is afforded some protection, I'd
recommend heading along to the SCL Scotland Annual Lecture in Edinburgh at
the end of the month:

http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ev16408

In fact I'd recommend anyone interested in F/OSS attends.

Not only would you get the chance to hear an inspirational address from non
other than Eben Moglen, but there might be an opportunity to solicit casual
opinions from a legal expert or two. I'd certainly imagine most, if not all,
of Scotland's free software supporting legal profession to be in attendance.
It goes without saying, of course, that tact would be required, and
appearing to have gatecrashed such an event purely for the purposes of a bit
of free legal advice on your pet cause, would likely not go down very well.
Fortunately, protecting the brand value created by grassroots Internet-based
communities, is clearly something that should concern free software advocates.
However, it must be noted that not all attendees may be free software
advocates, and some may simply be there to top up their CPD hours, or
possibly even be detractors who instead favour things like software patents.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Back
a at smokebelch.org