GermanLegalFellowship

From Document Freedom Day

Country

Germany

City

Berlin

About

Team focuses on free access to (and exchange with) the public sector in using free document formats.

Many courts, ministries etc. allow access / exchange only in certain formats. Thus a number of people can not voice their legal matters unless they use a certain given format.

Today very often there is a digital barrier between user of free formats and the public sector. The public sector is only prepared to exchange certain industry formats with the public (i.e. MS-Word, MS-Excel etc.).

The GermanLegalFellowship team:

• lists public access points (e.g. courts) which are open to the free formats
• lists those public access points which are not open
• lists legal (and other) reasons for free access
• lists court procedures and decisions that maintain the right of free access
• helps to achieve court decisions for free access
• ...

Legally there has to be access by all free formats - and maybe a few others. But certainly not vice versa.

Limited access in fact disables the user of free formats while other users have access.

Whenever the voice of a legal entity cannot be heard only because free document formats cannot be received, exchanged etc. this is unlawful.

Many other interest groups like for example the „handicapped“ (disabled or whatever word you prefer) complained if they were treated as disabled and would not have access to information etc. As a result public web-pages in Germany have to comply with certain access standards. The public sector already has to allow internet access to the disabled (certain standards for internet access like the W3 standard are obligatory: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-UAAG10-20010912/).

For the same reasons there has to be access to courts in all formats.

Documents are voices that should be open to all free and all broadly used formats.

On 26 March 2008 this team groups with other Berlin teams and congratulates the vice-chancellor for the open standard policy in the German Foreign Ministry. We have edited the German Main page. We received our packs and are happy. [1]