Technology Law Culture (Netherlands!) is going on extended hiatus for the coming six months. I have come to this decision seeing how recently I have not been able to give TLC — and by extension you, the reader — the care and attention (dare I say, the TLC?) it deserves.

Consequently, I am going to put this blog on extended hiatus for the coming six months. That’s right, six months. Technology Law Culture (Netherlands!) will be back — with more “Nerdfighter Power” — in August 2008.

Until then, may I point you to some of the many fine blogs in this blog’s blogroll: Video Game Law Blog; Internetrecht: actualiteiten en commentaar (in Dutch); Singularity; New Media Law; and The Law Factor (in Dutch)?

See you in August,
Olivier Oosterbaan

(Picture: DerrickT.)

On 20 December 2007, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs published (pdf) an English translation of its 17 September 2007 plan entitled “The Netherlands Open in Connection” announcing the steps that the Dutch government will take in the coming years to further the adoption of open standards and open source for software in use in the Dutch public sector.

In this month’s post, TLC will highlight some key points from the plan, but not before adding a little background on its history.

History: 2002 Lower House Motion on Open Standards and Open Source
The plan currently before us is the follow-up from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to a motion adopted by the lower house of the Dutch parliament in November 2002, requesting that the government (the executive) make (paraphrased) a maximum effort to ameliorate the situation that, since the supply-side of software is highly concentrated, sub-optimal use is made of the potential benefits of software to society and that high switching costs exist; and furthermore requesting that the government ensure that by 2006 all software in use in the public sector complies with open standards; and finally requesting that the government pro-actively stimulate the dissemination of open source software in the public sector, and to this end formulate concrete and ambitious goals.

The 2006 deadline from the motion not having been met, last summer the (new) government was prompted by a lower house committee to formulate steps to further the motion adopted, which resulted in the plan now before us. Most importantly, the plan contains obligations for the public sector to, going forward, use software that supports open standards. In addition, the plan contains the requirement that government bodies formulate a strategy for the adoption of open source software.

Part 1, Open Standards: “Comply-or-explain and commit”
Pursuant to the plan, the Dutch government will promote the use of open standards for use within the public sector. From the report:

“The Cabinet intends to encourage the use of open standards within the public and semi-public sector. The key focus here is: use open standards, or come up with a very good reason why this is not possible, and indicate when open standards will indeed be implemented. This is the principle of ‘comply or explain, and commit’. Through this the use of open standards will be given a firm foundation.”

What is, and what is not, an open standard is often a point of debate. Perhaps for this reason, for purposes of furthering the goals of the Dutch government, a body of it will:

“publish a basic list of open standards (checklist) in January 2008 for the benefit of citizens, businesses and government bodies. This list will then be maintained and further supplemented.”

Those who have in one capacity or another dealt with standard setting bodies may welcome this particular part of the plan.

Further to furthering open standards in general, one standard in particular is supported, whereas government bodies will be required to support the ISO standard ODF by 2008, in advance of switching to ODF altogether in 2013:

“Central Government Departments will from April 2008 support ODF alongside existing file formats for reading, writing and exchange of documents.”

(See also Brenno de Winter here on Macworld, via Slashdot.)

Part 2, Open Source: Preferred When Equally Suitable
Further to concrete goals of furthering the use of open standards within Dutch government operations, the 2007 plan also mentions a number of actions to be taken as regards open source software. More concretely, the plan dictates that:

“All ministries will have developed an implementation strategy by January 2009 for tendering and purchase and the use of open source software – by June 2008 more than half of the ministries.”

And, part of the reason for doing so is that:

“By using more open source software itself, the Dutch government can stimulate activity in the field of open source software. This provides social and economic benefits.”

These are possibly the more important parts of the 2007 report from the Dutch government on the adaptation of open standards and open source. TLC will report on its progress. In the meantime, I would like to invite you to the report (pdf) itself.

(And, off-topic: many thanks again to Arnoud Engelfriet for guest blogging last month. Yay!)

‡‡ [This is a post from Technology Law Culture: http://tlc.oosterbaan.net/. Olivier Oosterbaan, IT and media lawyer in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, maintains this blog.]

(Picture: Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade Mr. Van Heemskerk on the phone, used under permission.)

Recently, I was enjoying a rare quiet evening when my phone rang. No caller ID. At 9:30pm, I wasn’t expecting a telemarketeer, so I took the call. It turned out to be a telemarketeer after all, but a peculiar kind: a police officer told me in a stern voice that I had been seen biking at night without my bicycle lights on. That couldn’t be right: if I had been seen, my lights must have been working!

But when I tried to interrupt the officer to tell him that this wasn’t true, I was in for another surprise. This wasn’t a real officer - it was a voice recording!

Was this a joke by one of my friends? Far from it: officer Van Geel was part of an official Dutch campaign to promote bike lighting.

We Dutch like our bikes. We have millions of them, but virtually none of them have a working head- or taillight. This causes over 10,000 accidents, killing 40 and wounding 500 cyclists every year. Although the law has been on the books for decades, the Dutch consider it unfair to suddenly start ticketing people for 20 Euros. This prompted the government campaign “Lights on!” as part of their general “Gets you home” promotions for road safety. That campaign makes sense. But this part of it didn’t.

Telephone spam has been illegal since 1998. Before that, people would get unsolicited telephone calls with prerecorded messages they couldn’t interrupt or turn off. You’re thinking, why not hang up? The computer would just call back a minute later. Most annoying indeed. Thankfully, Directive 97/66/EC and its Dutch implementation outlaw the use of “automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines) or facsimile machines for the purposes of direct marketing” unless the operator had prior consent. And yes, that includes messages in the public interest.

Still slightly annoyed at being disturbed during the one free evening this month, I blogged about it and returned to my beer. The next morning, my stats had gone through the roof: Dutch shock blog Geenstijl had picked it up! Soon thereafter news site Webwereld opened with a response by the organizers: this was educational so it wasn’t spam. And besides, one of your friends had to have given them the phone number first.

Excuse me?

Yes, that was exactly how this campaign was organized: go to a website, enter your friend’s phone number and they will be called by officer Van Geel. Sure, there was an attempt to get consent by e-mail from the victim first, but that was so easy to fool it wasn’t even funny.

Is this how to teach kids to treat their friends’ personal data? The campaign was aimed at children, after all, including a nice big poster for schools. Kids should be careful whom they give their personal data to, except when someone who looks like a cop asks for it apparently. Right. Not surprisingly, this tattling aspect caused big criticism from the Dutch organisation Parents Online and even from political parties.

It thus shouldn’t come as a surprise that the next Monday, officer Van Geel got an early retirement.

Arnoud Engelfriet is a Dutch IT lawyer and a European patent attorney. He writes about law and technology on his website IusMentis.com. His bicycle lights are in perfect working order.