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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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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!
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
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.
IAAL,BIANLY