Open Tech Calendar

mySociety Meet-Up: Civic and democratic coding, with added conversation and snacks

Interested in civic coding, open data and eDemocracy?

Then come and join mySociety for a chat, beer and pizza at the TechCube in Edinburgh on Wednesday 4th June.

We’ll be joined by guest speakers:

Andy Wightman: Writer, researcher, analyst, commentator and activist on issues of land, power, governance, democracy and money. Andy is author of ‘Who Owns Scotland’ and 'The Poor Had No Lawyers' and, in an attempt to make landownership information more transparent, runs www.whoownsscotland.org.uk. We are delighted that Andy will join us at this mySociety meet-up to talk about landownership, community land rights and open democracy in Scotland.

We'll also be joined by:

Aaron Crane and James Mackenzie from Cutbot: In June 2012 Cutbot began the process of challenging the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA)’s licensing regime around media monitoring, specifically concerning the fees paid by charitable and other not-for-profit clients, and also the fees and other conditions to which they were subject.

The NLA currently charges small companies like Cutbot (with a turnover in the tens of thousands) just over £5k for a licence to scan content for their clients, while the largest companies, with turnovers in the millions, pay £10k. Google pay no equivalent licence for carrying out the same activities: they’re treated as non-commercial.

In March of this year, the Copyright Tribunal endorsed this fee structure, despite claims by Cutbot and others that it’s extremely unfair.

Come along to hear Cutbot’s Aaron Crane and James MacKenzie talk about their fight to get the NLA’s rules changed. They’ll also talk about the UK Supreme Court’s ruling against the NLA’s claim that the act of viewing freely-provided public content on the publishers’ own websites requires a licence. This has now been referred up to the European courts.

There'll also be plenty of time to chat with some of mySociety's developers about mySociety's websites and other open source projects.

http://lanyrd.com/cyyct

Wed 4th Jun 2014 6:00pm (Europe/London)

Wed 4th Jun 2014 9:00pm (Europe/London)

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