KnowRight06 Conference Vienna 16/17. Feb. 2006

From: Peter Paul Sint <sint[_at_]oeaw.ac.at>
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:30:32 -0500


Call for Participation:

KnowRight 2006 Conference. Vienna, Austria 16/17. Feb. 2006 Knowledge Rights -
Legal, Societal and Related Technological Aspects Austrian Computer Society - University of Vienna

Social, ethical and legal norms of handling Knowledge and Information are under stress. The conquest of offices, homes and mobile
environments for Knowledge transfer via e-Media change the conditions of human interaction. In this conference you will learn about the developments of

o	governance of the Information Society in general
o	Intellectual Property Rights - Software 
patents in Europe, USA and China
o	the clash between institutional copyright 
owners and Open Source movements
o	the openness of access to information
o	the needs to preserve and make accessible the cultural heritage,
o	the problems of handling sensitive 

information - crime prevention against privacy protection
o the protection of medical information, weighing the interests of patients and researchers

          with consideration of the appropriate technical means This volume helps to participate successfully in the debate about future options concerning the Creation, Distribution and use of Knowledge in the society.

A final conference program, an up to date time table, a form for online-registration (70 EUR), a list of hotels and further information may be found at
  http://KnowRight06.ocg.at

Proceedings will be included for participants on arrival.

List of contributions:

Keynote Lecture

Gaster, Jens (European Commission, DG Open Market): Copyright vs. Open Source. Quo vadis, Europa?

Governance of Information Society

Polcák, Radim (Masaryk Univ, Brno, CS): Kingdom of IT and IP Law and the Quest for Legitimacy

Pekari, Catrin (Univ. of Graz): Negotiating Access to Information and Knowledge in the 21st Century

Intellectual Property Rights

D'Agostino, Giuseppina (speaker); Hinds, Chris; Jirotka, Marina; Meyer, Charles; Piper, Tina and Vaver, David: (University of Oxford, UK and Minitray of Canadian Heritage - Copyright Policy, CA): IP Rights in Medical Data in a Grid Environment (Image): Challenges to Copyright and Database Law

Stolba, Nevena - Tjoa, A Min (Univ. of
Technology, Vienna): An Approach towards the Fulfilment of Security Requirements for Decision Support Systems in the Field of Evidence-Based Healthcare

Galinski, Christian (Termnet Austria): Protection of content in federated data repositories

Heidinger, Roman (Univ.of Economics, Vienna): Compulsory licensing of IP rights: The situation under EC competition law

Patent Systems

Kirsch, Gregory (Needle&Rosenberg, USA): Software and Business Method Patents in the United States

Skulikaris, Yannis (European Patent Office): Computer-Implemented Inventions: the EPO Legal Framework and Practice

Xu, Jiang (XiAn Jiaotong Univ., CN and Univ. of Darmstadt,DE) : Chinese patent system: the first two decades

Open Access to Data

Wiebe, Andreas (Univ.of Economics, Vienna): Open Access and Intellectual Property in Cyberspace

Törro, Teija; Saarenpää, Ahti (Univ. of Lapland, FI): Access to legal information on the net - Some Finnish views

Reis, Leonhard (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna): The two roads to Open Access - not only an IP-law problem

Wigell-Ryynänen, Barbro (Ministry of Education and Culture, Fi): Ensuring Citizenship in the Knowledge Society                           

Preservation and IP

Schweighofer, Erich; Rauber, Andreas (Univ.of Vienna): Conservation of the Electronic National Heritage for the Future - Legal and Policital Considerations

Schöwerling, Helena (Univ. of Economics, Vienna): Google Book Search: Can the "Digitization Project" be justified by the Fair Use Principle According to US-Copyright Law?

Handling Sensitive Information

Büllesbach, Alfred (Daimler-Chrysler, DE): Building Confidence through Data Protection

Allhutter, Doris; Hanappi-Egger, Edeltraud (Univ. of Economics, Vienna): Information Ethics and the EU-Policy on 'Adult Content': Civil Liberties and Their Limitation in the Safer Internet Action Plans

Hofstötter, Bernhard (Fribourg, CH): The Retention of Telecommunications Data in Europe - A Paradigm Shift in European Data Protection Law?

Rauhofer, Judith (Univ. Edinburgh, GB): History does not matter them - Moves towards the adoption of mandatory communications data retention in the European Union

From the preface of the Proceedings:

The KnowRight Conferences, held since 1995, intend to resume the general interest of the KnowRight, on the interaction of Intellectual Property Rights, related Information Rights, Ethical Problems, and information dependent Technology. KnowRight provides strong emphasis on the social environment in which the intellectual and information property system, information services, mobile applications, e-commerce and the electronic civil society evolve.
This time, KnowRight is held in tandem with the IRIS conference (Internationales Rechtsinformatik Symposion) at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna.
Options of the regulation of the Information Society are still under intensive discussion by governments and authorities in many countries and regions (e.g. the European Union). Increasingly it becomes obviously harder to master future technologies with traditional laws based on national or regional methods and concepts. New forms of international legal regimes and practices have been and have to be developed that should empower coordinated means to avoid abuse of such new technologies.
New regulations must also duly take into account that the human heritage remains accessible to the public. Therefore equitable and fair use of networks and new resources shall be guaranteed. Fairness should be preserved in the emerging non-local availability of up to now local resources. Open Source and Open Content are investigated as examples of dynamic innovations of legal concepts.
The conference will address in particular the following topics:
- A keynote on Copyright and Open Source
(Representative of the European Commission)
- Governance of Information Society

The keynote will address the most pressing question on KnowRight: How can the objectives of Copyright and Open Source be best co-ordinated? It is not so much the question of more or less copyright than a balancing between both approaches (cf. the paper of Gaster).

The World Summit of the Information Society in Geneva and Tunis has - besides the main topics of digital divide and internet governance (cf. the paper of Pol_ák) - also touched intellectual property rights (cf. the paper of Pekari). The importance of IPR was stressed and the
negotiations reflected the diverging interests at stake. New concepts like Open Source and Open Content, however, were insufficiently discussed and endorsed. UNECSO, together with WIPO and WTO, will be responsible for the follow-up of this topic.

IPR and data protection issues raise many questions in healthcare (cf .the papers of Stolba and Tjoa and that of D'Agostino, Hinds, Jirotka, Meyer, Piper and Vaver). A quite complex form of a contractual and technical environment is required in order to meet the different aims of the applications as well as those of intellectual property and data protection.

Similar IPR problems arise concerning federated data repositories (cf. the paper of Galinski). Compulsory licensing has strong limits and cannot guarantee access to software and content (cf. the paper of Heidinger).

Besides some flaws, patent systems seem to work quite well in practice, also for software (cf. the papers of Kirsch, Skulikaris and Xu). Applications for patent protection of software are still rising. The rejection of the proposed Software Patent Directive has not ended the discussion in Europe. Interests of business and civil society are still clashing and the effects of a possible software patent directive in Europe are still not well understood.

Open access - the free of charge online access to materials - is as a concept compatible with copyright principles (cf. the paper of Wiebe). However, the CC attribution licenses leave some open questions. Public funded research and content should be made available; publishers should be also cooperative for this aim (cf. the papers of Reis and Törrö). Libraries will still play an important role in granting effective open access. Actually availability of free information on the net may increase the use of libraries at least in the short run (cf. the paper of Wigell-Ryynänen).

Public (in particular national) libraries as well as the private sector (Google Book Search) are concerned with conservation of digital heritage. Whereas conservation institutions are still in the research phase due to unsolved legal problems (cf. the paper of Schweighofer and Rauber), Google has moved a step further and is creating a digital book archive. Legal problems are also here unsolved but fair use under US law may provide a legal basis (cf. the paper of Schöwerling).

Personal data are a valuable resource for companies but also the law enforcement
institutions. Collection of personal data is getting quite easy; law must and does establish barriers to that. Business has to treat personal data in a sensitive way in order not to destroy customer relationships (cf. the paper of Büllesbach); the same is true for states. Strong moves to more and more data collection (e.g. retention of telecommunications data) leads to high awareness and suspicion among the civil society (cf. the papers of Höfstötter and Rauhofer). However, the state is also a recipient of information ethics aims (cf. the paper of Allhutter and Hanappi-Egger).

-- 
KnowRight 2006
Austrian Computer Society (OCG)
Wollzeile 1-3
A-1010 Vienna
E-Mail: KR06[_at_]ocg.at
Tel: +43 1 512 02 35-14
Fax: +43 1 512 02 35-9

Peter Paul Sint
Institute for European Integration Research
Austrian Academy of Sciences EIF, Prinz Eugen-Strasse 8-10,
A-1040 Wien/Vienna, Austria, EU
vox +43 664 2750023  (fax +431-51581-7566)
Received on Fri Feb 03 2006 - 02:30:32 GMT

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