Turre Legal counseled a consortium of Finland’s universities of applied science (aka. AMK) to create a digital repository for theses and research publications . The project adopted a joint Open Access mandate that means that annually 20.000 academic thesis and thousands of scholarly articles written by the staff of the AMK will be openly accessible online.
After 1 January 2010, the Universities of Applied Sciences will require all teachers and researchers who work at the universities to save a copy of their research essays that are published in scientific publications, or a university publication series, in the open electronic library, Theseus.
According to Harvard’s open access guru Peter Suber “This is, by far, the largest set of institutions to adopt a joint OA mandate.”
As a part of the project Turre’s partner Herkko Hietanen has been translating Creative Commons 3.0 licenses to Finnish legal system. The license translation and adoption is at its final stretches and waits for the CC headquarters’s approval. Theseus enables students and teachers to choose a Creative Commons license to their works if they so desire.
Here is a poster of the project and here is an article published in SciecomInfo.
Here is the current draft of the CC 3.0 license for you consideration. Comments to the license are welcomed.
Vantaa district court decided in a case that defines the limits of freedom of speech and online liability that discussion forum administrators are not liable for people gathering to float down the river drinking beer. That is even as the participants used the discussion forum to discuss the organization of the event.
CC-By-SA by HenriBergius. More photos of Kaljakellunta: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=kaljakellunta&w=all&s=int
The prosecutor got tired of hundreds of beer drinking people floating down the Vantaa river every year in “Kaljakellunta” -event. The beer floaters use inflatable rubber boats and ferries to float down the river. Key part of the event is beer drinking. While alcohol and water are integral parts of the event, there has not been any reported major injuries during the +10 year history of the event.
Prosecutor claimed that two men, who were administrators of kaljakellunta.com discussion forum, were the organizers of the event, and thus liable for cleaning up the mess that hundreds of “drunken sailors” made along the river. However, the court saw that the defendants had just posted the date of the 2008 event to the main page of the site after the discussion had reached consensus of it. They had not contributed otherwise to the organization of the event. The actions of defendants did not make them an organizers of the event. The court also looked at the 2009 kaljakellunta event which had even more participants even though the kaljakellunta.com had been closed for over a year.
The fact that the Kaljakellunta-crowd is turning to Facebook and other social networks to help to organize the event just shows that the law has hard time managing self organizing online communities that have no other ties that members like for beer.
Disclaimer: Turre Legal was the defense counsel for the both defendants. And yes, we may join the fellow sailors floating down the river next year drinking beer on a floating devices.
Glenn Rune Gallefoss left and Mikko Välimäki right in Bergen, Norway, 6.6.2009.
We just received confirmation that the first filing in our case against Timbaland and Universal Music has been made in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida. There is a prior case ongoing in the Helsinki Court of Appeal. We have been representing Glenn Rune Gallefoss, a Norwegian Commodore 64 musician, whose rights have been transferred to Kernel Records Ltd. Some background of the case is here. We are living interesting times…