NEWS: Iain G Mitchell QC addresses European conferences
Posted On: 25 May 2011
Iain Mitchell QC has recently attended a number of prestigious meetings and events around Europe arising from his expertise in the fields of intellectual property, information technology and public procurement.
Iain gave the keynote address before a large audience of both practising and academic lawyers at the Annual Conference of the British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA) held at the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University on 12th April. His address sought to pick up many of the themes – copyright, intellectual property, data protection, wiki leaks, social networks – which had been covered in the more than 50 papers which had been presented to the conference and to set those papers in a wider social context, focussing on the balance between the rights of intellectual property owners and of the wider public and examining the broader implications for the respect for law and coherence of society. He suggested that the balance had tipped too far in the direction of rights holders, who seek to enforce their rights by increasingly draconian and increasingly ineffective measures such as the Digital Economy Act 2010.
Iain also spoke on 8th April at the Annual Conference of the European Legal Network held in Amsterdam, on the subject of IT procurement in the European Union. The European Legal Network is the world’s largest and most influential network of Open Source Software Lawyers. He looked at the European Commission’s new European Interoperability Framework and whether, in public procurement, it would really make a difference in levelling the playing field between Open Source and Proprietary software, especially in light of problems of vendor lock-in and the Commission’s own decision to upgrade over 36,000 desktop computers to Windows 7 without running a tendering exercise. He suggested that this was a decision worth judicially challenging and that such a challenge would go a long way to clarify just how effective the new interoperability framework would be.
Iain is the United Kingdom Representative on the IT Committee of the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) and continues to participate in their meetings held in various locations across Europe. He is Chairman of the Scottish Society for Computers & Law and co-convenor of the Scottish Lawyers’ European Group and rated Band 1 in Chambers Directory for both IT law and public procurement law.