Slashdot Mirror
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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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
...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
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
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.
IAAL,BIANLY
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.
patents and copyrights will expire and as such there is a growing base of public domain.
Except that practically nothing copyrighted has become public domain for decades now. I think saying "copyrights will expire" is being overly optimistic, and maybe downright presumptuous. If Disney's lawyers and campaign contributions have anything to say about it, no copyrighted work will ever again become public domain unless it's specifically made so by the owner.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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.
FWIW, Danse, Lessig and others discussed this particular issue at the conference. There is one case (Eldred v. Reno) that the Supreme Court is looking at soon and may break the Disney Act; if not, there are three others wending their way through the courts. The (extremely bright) group of lawyers at the conference seemed fairly confident that this latest overreaching would be a key component of the downfall of the law.
IAAL,BIANLY
Considering I had to look up what CPUSA is, I don't think so.
However, I wonder if my LP.org, or more specifically LPNC.org could arrange such a lecture-
probably not due to funds, but then, neither could CPUSA (which I'm pretty sure that Benkler, Moglen and Lessig have no affiliation with.)
The (extremely bright) group of lawyers at the conference seemed fairly confident that this latest overreaching would be a key component of the downfall of the law.
I would hope so. I've read Lessig's book "Code", but I haven't looked into the Eldred case lately. I'll be reading these papers tomorrow probably, they sound interesting.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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.
IAAL,BIANLY
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.