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Public Domain Conference Papers Online.
bwoodard writes "Over the weekend Duke University Law school held a conference on the public domain which included many well known Free Software advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen. The papers (in PDF) are presented were quite thought provoking and well worth a read." Timothy brought this
conference to our attention on scary halloween.
This term is rather confusing. To scientists, conference papers means scientific papers on recend findings submitted for scientific conferences. These are copyrighted to the owners (usually) but you can read it if you subscribe to IEEE, for example -- and extend it or cite it for your works. I was confused at first at the term "Public Domain".
You should give this post a title like "Conference Paper of Center for the Public Domain" to distinguish this from scientific conference papers.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Trying not to troll (but if you mod me down, it's ok, cause I got lotsa karma). /. material?
Honestly, chrisd, is this front
Looking at the original article, which had very few comments, and now looking at the comments here (at the time of writing *all* -1 trolls), it should show that this isn't something that should appear on the front page.
I know it may be a slow news day, but there's always good techno-bits of news out there...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The main idea behind open source is that everybody should reuse and contribute to the sources freely. But for this to happen you need licenses everybody can understand. Most programmer ain't laywers, so if the licenses is too complicated everybody is scared away which makes open source useless.
So I wonder if this isn't the wrong way. These academic laywers will create too complicated licenses and legal babble which will scare all programmers away from using open source.
I think this is a big problem with the laywers you have in the US. Everwere they see something they crawl on to many all complicated and to suck money from class action suits. We here in europe are very lucky that we don't have such things. We might have weapon control but we won't have any raving mad laywers to sue our butt off.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
From the Goldman paper:
Few companies who develop free software have proven themselves on Wall Street. The problem is not so much the profitability of free software itself, but rather the profitability of their misguided approach. Free software should be used to supplement a traditional, profitable strategy, rather than as the core strategy of a business.
This made a lot of sense to me. My sister worked at one of the failed Linux dot-coms and from what she described, it seemed like her company (to remain nameless) took the "Free Software first, business strategy second" approach. The only thing left of that company is a bunch of homeless guys and a couple Aeron chairs for sale on ebay. Ouch.
By contrast, one of the companies who had used Linux to their advantage in a profitable way is IBM. They started with a very profitable consulting division, and expanded it through judicious contributions to Linux. Their move to Linux saved them a lot of money in training costs, kept things standardized, and helped provide a united front against the competition (Microsoft, Sun, etc.).
~wally
The entire license should be:
License: You can do anything you want with this source code except license it under GNU's license.
Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
If you don't read any of the others, read that one, it talks about us!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
...to the GhostScript open-source PDF reader, right beside the link for Adobe Acrobat. Sadly, though, the link is broken, thanks to an extra space at the end.
Atention to detale is impotent!
Exactly what does Open Source have to do with IP licensed in the public domain? Very little. GPL and BSD certainly aren't public domain licenses, in fact the only real license that can be considered `Public Domain' is..er...public domain. Of which I know very little currently maintained software (though respond if I'm wrong).
Open Source would be much better suited to a conference on how to word licenses effectively to ensure the intentions of those who wrote the various licenses granting rights and responsibilitities are honored and can be legally protected.
Mike
dang it, the one weekend I go out of town, Lessig, Moglen, and Benkler come to lecture! Lousy lousy lousy- I wanted to be there!
There are posts asking what this notice has to do with nerds and their news. I gotta say this is the hottest link I've pulled from /. in months. The material domain of this conference cuts right to the heart of what is important about software libre and the digitisation of cultural activity. The pragmatist coders here will say that its all about efficiency of algorithms, fast debugging, and software development models. Not so. What is at stake is not RIAA profits, closed Windows API's or top-down management models. What is at stake are fundamental assumptions the 20C capitalist West has made about the nature and outcomes of intellectual activity. There is a real revolution in the works and, as is so often the case, those at the forefront don't always realize what they're fighting for or what they are really achieving. I'm not wheezing about the digital future; there are real changes afoot in the way we think, create and work. The papers here begin the work of specifying those changes.
illegitimii non ingravare
Please forward this to /. management. They need make money. This not make money.
Not Communists, more like Marxists
But still not enough proof that /. is really a hotbed of leftwing conspirators.
----This isn't a man who is leaving with his head between his legs.
see www.trilug.org for details. Its in Chapel Hill if anyone is local.
You can probably still schedule a meeting with your local CPUSA representative. The end result will be the same.
I see several papers mentioned - don't miss Lessig's "The Architecture of Innovation." He's running with the ideas that he presented in Code, and they have definitely evolved since then. The description of the different notions of architecture/ownership at the outset of the paper is worth the price of admission alone. I'm not sure how much is replicated in his new book The Nature of Ideas, but this article is stark in its description of the challenges that we face, as well as bleak in terms of his expectations for the future given the path that we are on now.
...at NCSSM, which is right down the street from Duke. Congrats to JP to organizing this thing--great job!
/. is "close" to S&M, like that post awhile back about high speed photography or (*this). It's always really cool when a great institution like this one gets attention.
It's always been cool when a post on
patents and copyrights will expire and as such there is a growing base of public domain. Intentional injection into this and compatable directions only helps to establish benefits for all alot sooner, like while we are still alive, you and me. It's what is presenting MS with it's real threat. Natural legal evolution of software property.
I just noticed today (in part due to this /. story) that a paper that was seminal in the development of my thinking on IP is now online: Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach. The same author has another interesting paper up called Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified?: The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects. I've been recommending the first to people for nearly a decade, so I'm very pleased to find it out of the law library and online.
...is the best read on collage since
barnsley's theorem. negativland was there
way before the web and its interpreters
samuelson and lessig.
(but then, so was m. duchamp and l.h.o.o.q.)
Yes, yes, man! But you failed to mention Kurt Schwitters. Merz lives! Merz dies! Merz lives again!
Its always kind of spooky when you run into an artist so far ahead of his time. I am sure there is that sense among contemporaries and for himself, that he his pushing the boundaries, but oftentimes without knowing precisely how or in what direction. It is a remarkable thing to be able to watch a century old work of art grow into its significance; the zeitgeist coalescing around it like a growing crystal.
illegitimii non ingravare
Yep in the real world there's only about 1% difference if you run a ATA 66 drive off a ATA 66 controller with a 40 core cable (there-by forcing it to default back to 33mhz), & if you run it at 66mhz (by using a 80 core cable).
Really until HDD technology catches up ATA 100 & ATA 133 are just wank offs. Its only just now (after 2 years) than new drives are reaching the limits of ATA 33, let alone ATA 66.
The topic preamble mentions Eben Moglen - but I can't find his paper. Can you help? Where is it?
Thx
The US is certainly an exception. They accept the fact that sports stars, (some)lawyers and (some) doctors should be hugely overpaid. Luckily though one is allowed to own guns so raving lawyers can be dealt "Shakespearean" justice ... ;-)