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.

Yay! IT law now has it’s own wiki, the appropriately named: The IT Law Wiki. Professor Michael D. Scott, of Southwestern Law School, and author of the Singularity blog, initiated the wiki. The wiki, less than a month old, already contains 591 entries, on subjects such as the CAN-SPAM Act, chronologies of events from the 1960’s onwards, and on open source and closed source.

Actually, the above examples show three things. One, many entries are as yet stubs and need expanding. Two, the wiki appears under-organized (as in, spontaneously organized), which should resolve over time and whereby the individual entries should also become more valuable. Three, the current bias of the wiki to U.S. law. This is not the fault of the U.S. authors, and in fact only something contributors from outside the United States can remedy. It’s also the users that can remedy the first and second points mentioned.

So please, go over to itlaw.wikia.com, look around, get a feel for the place, and see where you can give and take information.

‡‡ [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: Screen grab from the IT Law Wiki.)

Een paar weken terug luisterde ik naar het radio-programma De Elektronische Eeuw van Herbert Blankesteijn op BNR waarin Jan Willem Broekema van OSOSS (Open Source als Onderdeel van de Software Strategie) onder andere vertelde over het boek “Open gemeenten” dat OSOSS recent had uitgegeven. OSOSS:

Dit boek, waarin naast de inventarisatie meer dan 30 praktijkvoorbeelden beschreven zijn, moet de gehele publieke sector inspireren na te denken over nut en noodzaak bij aanbesteding van ICT: een dwarse zoektocht door alternatief denken. Onder die titel is het eerste exemplaar van “Open Gemeenten” op 17 september 2007 aangeboden aan staatssecretaris Frank Heemskerk van Economische Zaken.

In de uitzending noemde de heer Broekema dat het boek niet meer in gedrukte vorm verkrijgbaar was, maar dat het onder een Creative Commons licentie ter beschikking was gesteld. Zonder verdere informatie op dat moment over het soort CC licentie waaronder het boek ter beschikking was gesteld, leek het mij een goede gelegenheid voor een CC verdienmodel experiment! Wie zou er geld kunnen vragen voor een investering (in tijd en middelen) in het beschikbaar maken van een her-uitgave?

Omdat het boek uiteindelijk onder een BY-NC-SA NL licentie ter beschikking is gesteld, ik in elk geval niet. Dit gebaseerd op de tekst van de licentie zelf, en op de richtlijnen van Creative Commons, zoals hier eerder besproken. Wel kan ik vragen om een vrijwillige bijdrage, bijvoorbeeld aan Creative Commons, op dit moment bezig met een pledge drive.

De onmogelijkheid om bij CC NC licenties geld te vragen voor de investering in tijd en middelen voor het heruitgeven wijkt af van bijvoorbeeld de GPL, welke licentie heeft geleid tot alternatieve verdienmodellen voor free software. Bijvoorbeeld, Red Hat die een (gratis) linux distributie ter beschikking stelt, en geld vraagt voor de cd en handleiding of diensten. (Let wel, ik zeg niet dat OSOSS haar boek niet onder een NC licentie ter beschikking had moeten stellen.)

De incentive om tijd en middelen ter beschikking te stellen in het her-uitgeven van NC werken zal in dit geval ergens anders vandaan moeten komen. In mijn geval is het whuffie, en omdat (de her-editie van) het boek al was klaargemaakt bij deze alsnog de link naar lulu.com, waar je het boek in een zwart-wit uitgave voor € 6,01 (+ shipping) kan nabestellen, hier.

English Summary

(The above post explains how I have made available, through a print-on-demand service, a book from OSOSS, a Dutch organization that promotes “the use of open source as part of the software strategy”. This inspired by a radio-interview with a representative of OSOSS on Dutch radio, in which he mentioned that the book was out-of-print, but licensed under a CC license. As the dissemination of CC licensed works had been on my mind – and in the interest of science! – I decided to make the work available in a re-edition, and possibly ask for a small mark-up (that I would then give away). However, as the book was originally licensed under a BY-NC-SA license, I could not ask for anything other than a voluntary contribution. (Which is logical in a way.) If anything, this little experiment shows how there currently are limited incentives for third parties to invest in making available re-editions of (or derivative works based exclusively on) NC licensed works. Mind, I am not saying that this is a bad thing, just something that is there.

UPDATE: Naar aanleiding van een post op Livre, een update. Misschien was ik hierboven wat te kort, maar voor het eigenlijke maken of bezorgen van de heruitgave van een NC gelicentieerd werk mag wel geld gevraagd worden, zolang dit maar is:

for a service being provided to (in the case of, for example, a for-profit copy shop) or by an allowable NC user incidental to the use of the NC-licensed work (e.g. course packs provided by an educational institutions)

(Zie de Proposed Best Practice Guidelines To Clarify The Meaning Of “Noncommercial” In The Creative Commons Licenses van Creative Commons US onder C.)

De printer mag dus geld vragen voor de dienst van het drukken; ik niet voor de dienst van het klaarmaken. Althans, dit volgens de bovengenoemde richtlijnen van wat NC inhoudt. Met de auteursrechthebbende mag ik altijd iets anders afspreken, maar dit verhoogt de transactiekosten. Dit zoals al eerder hier besproken op TLC. Afijn, je kan het boek bestellen voor € 6,01 plus verzendkosten, met € 0,0 mark-up voor mijzelf. Het is een interessante uitgave, tenminste als je liever over Asterisk leest, dan dat je een Asterix leest ^^.

(Above update to clarify that I myself do not charge any mark-up for making the mentioned book avialable through print-on-demand, and that the in-store price is for the printing and shipping only, which is allowed under the interpretation of Creative Commons of the NC licenses. This in response to a post on Livre.nl that might have confouded this part of my post.)

‡‡ [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: A small part of the cover of the book in question. Original work by OSOSS under a BY-NC-SA 3.0 NL license; derivative work (insofar there is one) by Olivier Oosterbaan, and consequently also under a BY-NC-SA 3.0 NL license.)