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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.
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Here's a preview of a brief fragment of what I've been writing (for context, I went to the conference):
What I learned this weekend that every programmer, and every program user, and everyone else need to know
- You have the constitutional right to speak; in other words, a constitutional right to create and use ideas. Creators and peddlers of information have a constutional responsibility to serve the "Public Good", for which in return they get the strictly limited right to copyrights and patents. Their current goals serve their own goods, not those of the public, so your right to learn and to create should win when your goals and theirs conflict.
- Hackers aren't alone in realizing there is a problem. As a Linux user, I've known copyright and patent have been eating at my rights for a long time. I'd thought we were sort of alone in that realization, along with maybe a few clueful folks like Lessig and Barlow. But it turns out a
lot of other people understand the problem and are working towards solutions. There is an entire movement here, coming into being as
you read this. And it's full of incredibly bright and good people who are on our side.
- We are also not alone in being affected. The continued erosion of the public domain threatens the ability of artists to create; it threatens
the ability of biochemists to fight illness; it threatens the ability of every academic to create new knowledge. From now on, when I talk to my family and friends about Dmitry or DeCSS, I'll also talk about how Negativland creates music, and how patents on SNPs can stop medical research, and how academic journals that are free create information much more efficiently than closed journals. [FIXME: links] And it isn't an American problem, either: it's a global problem, with implications not only for America and Europe but for the second and third world as well. [FIXME: links]
- We need to be involved. Obviously, we need lawyers to argue for us in court, but they need us too. They need our numbers; they need our
help in generating publicity; they need our help in proving that people can and will work for the public domain for any number of reasons.
Obviously this is still a work in progress [the links are intended to point at specific papers and webcasts]; I was hoping to have a few more days beforeIAAL,BIANLY
It's actually in Durham at the NC School for Science and Math, and less a conference and more just a speech by Eben Moglen. But it should be really interesting; I'd urge anyone in the area to go.
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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.
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.
Eldred (quick refresher for the /tons/ of people looking at this fascinating thread) is basically about an online archiver who puts works whose copyrights have expired on the web. He sued, claiming his first amendment right to post these works had been abridged. A good summary of the state of the case is here.
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