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Berlin Conf. On The Future Of The Digital Commons
vgrass writes "More than 100 speakers from all over the globe will come together in Berlin next week to discuss free software, free content and free infrastructures at the Wizards of OS 3. The Future of the Digital Commons (10-13 June). Speakers include Ross Anderson, Larry Lessig, Michael Tiemann, Jimbo Wales, William Fisher, Charlotte Hess, Rishab Ghosh, Christoph Hellwig, Eben Moglen, Jah Shaka, Ethan Zuckerman, Doug Cutting, Ralph Giles & Wendy Seltzer. Specials will include the Launch of Creative Commons Germany and a joint statement to the European Commission urging them to implement a music flatrate."
Oh thats right, Tradgedy of the Commons doesn't work for the "digital commons".
I hope they also get around to making a joint statement against software patents. Seems like the pro-patent forces in europe keep popping up.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
They should be talking about software patents. Although music rights are an important topic, They need to come hard agaist software patents. They need to point the EU to some of the patents that the USTO gives out. Tell them 5 years, then they will be patenting "light comes on when HDD active"
We can talk shit about the Music Industry later.
Looking through the names in the article, none jumped out at me as book publishers advocating free-er distribution of books. Looks lke Jim Baen (http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm) and/or Eric Flint (http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm) would be someone fitting pretty well in that event.
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
A link to the english front page, since the submitter seems to not have realized that it was in german. ;)
So they are going to sit around and talk about the "digital commons" (whatever that means -- I can only assume that it is all those blogs which so thoughtfully use Creative Commons licensing so that we can one day collect their best posts in a convenient coffee-table book format), and to what end? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Free Software movement get started without a "symposium" of "more than 100 speakers"? Didn't Open Source happen without a yearly conference? Hell, Project Gutenburg is probably older than many of the speakers -- the very same speakers who want to tell us all about free content, and how great it is, and what we can do with it, despite the fact that we already know all they could possibly have to say.
You can take any bottom-up, individual-centered ideal, like those of the Free Software or Open Source communities, hold a conference on it, attended by maybe a few hundred people, and what's the end result? The vast bulk of people producing the quote-unquote content don't need to be told what to do, so they won't attend the conference anyway. The whole point seems to be to allow a (excessively large) number of speakers to indulge in pointless navel-gazing, all of which will be rercorded and analyzed ad nauseum by the other speakers in their weblogs. Free Software and Open Source geeks don't need to hold conferences, or have an agenda set by some cabal from above -- they do, quite simply, what they want, and that self-centered view has given us Linux, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and other great pieces of software. Why attempt to change that with some yearly "conference" and excercise in self-aggrandizement for a mish-mash of genuine techies and blogging "celebrities"?
Seriously, I would like to hear from someone going to this, specifically as to why they are going, and what exactly they expect to achieve (other than writing more blog entries)?
From the Gentoo desktop of Luke Harman
Another interesting conference on a smaller scale was held in Viennal last week: Free Bitflows. Participants there were Brewster Kahle from Archive.org (with images of the Amsterdam PetaBox), Ian Clarke from Freenet, Musicians favoring fair and free distribution, and the organizer of Wizards of OS, among others. What are links to comparable events in the US?
Does it make me any less of a geek if I have no friggin idea who any of those people are?
We need trading cards or something.
Hey! We could even make yet another geek convention around them too! Just imagine: The 1st Annual Geeks Collecting Geek Trading Cards Convention. That would make it the... AGCGTCC. Oh. My. God! Its like, DNA or something! That could be our theme! A big double helix for a logo, and giant stands of "geek DNA" all over the convention center! Of famous geeks too, like Einstein! Yeah! That would totally RULE!
Wow, I am so brilliant, I even scare myself sometimes!
(PS: Knowing my luck, someones already started this idea somewhere. That or one of you nuts will take it seriously and actually attempt it. I don't know which would be more hillarious... or frightening.)
urging them to implement a music flatrate.
What's a "music flatrate"? Some sort of price fixing, perhaps?
nice :)
Jimbo Wales: the man behind Wikipedia, a free, open-content, online encyclopedia?
The whole point seems to be to allow a (excessively large) number of speakers to indulge in pointless navel-gazing, all of which will be rercorded and analyzed ad nauseum by the other speakers in their weblogs.
Bah! They might have some fun together...
Imagine that!
I'm not going to this conference, but in my experience conferences are as much about the chance to go and share ideas informally with people working in related areas as they are the formal speeches. As well as being a spur to creativity, getting to know somebody personally and discovering they're not just a sardonic e-mail writer tends to reduce the level of flaming on mailing lists. And has it occurred to you that conferences might be just plain fun for the participants?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music. If there are monopolies and price-fixing, by all means break them up and institute sanctions, but more price-fixing isn't the way to go. As an individual artist I should have control over my own work, and it's not the government's role to say otherwise.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And besides, what's so fun about "music flatrates"? It sounds like some kind of disease.
Music flatulence? Now that really can be fun...
You might like it.
And for those who dont know this man, he is one of the Pioneers of the UK Reggae soundsystems and producers and still has alot to offer to the reggae fanatics worldwide!
http://www.jahshakasoundsystem.com/
Give Raspect to His Majesty!
yush
For free software advocates this is easy to answer: if you don't teach people to value software freedom, people will trade it away. We wouldn't have the free software community if it weren't for people doing the work of writing the software, but for some time the community has been expanding faster than we can teach people what makes this community so interesting; faster than we can teach the newcomers why we need to defend our freedom to share and modify software. Conferences help with this because people listen to interesting talks and get to ask questions they might not think to ask in e-mail.
Not everyone will give that perspective on the issue (Eben Moglen probably will) but since they don't all share the same philosophy, one would expect there to be differences (your text doesn't clearly indicate that you understand the differences between the two movements). I've not seen any free software conference that had to do with celebrity creation or self-aggrandizement. I've seen genuine opportunities for learning and sharing. Very interesting conversations are started at these conventions and they always go beyond the conference rooms.
Perhaps most importantly, conferences give the participants a chance to politically mobilize one another by talking face-to-face. The free software community is far less organized than it should be (particularly in the USA) about signficant threats including software patents. My experience with electoral politics (trying to get a local man on the ballot for Congress and then trying to get people to vote for him) tells me that face-to-face interaction is far more likely to get results than sending e-mail or trying to get someone to visit your blog. Electronic communication is very easily ignored.
This conference is not just a free software conference, which is good. It places free software in a larger more significant context which includes media reform. This will help educate free software people on other related issues and give free software enthusiasts a chance to help others learn about our community.
Digital Citizen
That's because almost all modern governments are either repressive dictatorships (e.g., China) or are completely bought and paid for by the big multinationals.
The repressive dictatorships want to control the flow of information in order to maintain their power, and the big multinationals want to control the flow of information in order to maximize their profit.
A digital commons is an anathema to both.
And so, in time, the digital commons will disappear in a fog of eternal copyrights and patents. The USPTO today allows patents on everything, including (I seem to recall reading) things which were previously patented (where said previous patent has expired). This practice will continue and will get worse. And the EU will eventually mandate patents on everything (including software), too, since the EU Commission just has to keep approving it and sending it back to the EU Parliament until enough pressure has been brought to bear on the EU Parliament by the multinationals that they pass it. That won't take long -- almost everyone has a price, which means that almost everyone can be bought and paid for. Those that can't will probably tend to have "accidents" much more often than those that can.
You think I'm too cynical? 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway.
Look at the long-term trends. See if you can say with a straight face that I'm wrong after following the long-term trends to their logical conclusion.
Richard Stallman's "right to read" dystopia is a mere hint of what's to come.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Poor Mr. Stallman would be rolling over in his grave, if he were dead.
I really appreciate the coverage these events receive on Slashdot, but for people who aren't already in Europe it is a little short-notice to make arrangements. What I have searched for in vain is a comprehensive calendar of every single event of interest to the Open Source / Open Standards / Creative Commons community -- from OSCON to LUG monthlies.
n so urce/events.jsp
Here are a couple of useful Event links; if anybody has more please post or email eb.dnim@essej (sdrawkcab) - thank you!
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/views/ope
http://www.linux-events.de/Events
I'm serious, this is not a flame.
Why do we need a digital commons? And why are so many people anti-patent?
Patents ensure that the individuals or companies that invest time and capital to research and produce new technologies can profit from it. And time has shown (with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the market-based reforms of China) that profit is a greater incentive towards the common good than "communal" based economic systems.
I understand the recent faux pauxs of the US Patent office and illegitimate patents, but rather than throwing away a system that has served us well for over two centuries, why not simply reform it?
Which again brings me back to, why do we need a digital commons? Again, a question asked out of ignorance and not antipathy.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
And even if patents are the best form of regulation for the drug business, what makes you think that patents, and copyrights longer than a lifetime, are the best idea for other industries? Have you considered that maybe software, where the costs in developing a patentable "invention" are often dwarfed by the fees to the lawyers who draft the patent, is a different kettle of fish? That the creative arts have, throughout most of recorded history, developed best by the liberal sampling of previous work?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I find it interesting how "multinational" has become a bad word. It is not just a company it is a "big multinational" run for your lives. Whereas other smaller companies are not held in such contempt. It is foolish.
It is a mistake to say that big multinationals have bought out governments. Companies of all sizes have paying for legislation since before the American revolution. Most companies have formed industry groups to better lobby politicians. It is not just companies. Labour unions have been strongarming government since the first strike.
Blameing the "Big Multinationals" is just a trivialization of the problem.
A really interesting conference I attended in Germany earlier in the year is worth looking at Neuro Conference which both theorised the free software/copyleft stuff but also put into practice the methods of self-organisation and networking.
I went along and was fascinated to see how it all locked together and worked so well. The papers are on the Site here and there are some really interesting reads.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
who are about to use a slow connection...we salute you!...
Ist hier die Verbindung auf englisch....or..."here is the link in English". Well, according to babelfish anyway...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Yes, Jimbo Wales (warning: Wikipedia is down). It's been mentioned before on the Wikipedia-L list...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Next week, on June 18th, the dutch translation of the Creative Commons license will be launched in Amsterdam (see www.disc.nl for more information). Lawrence Lessig will also be present. Let's share in Holland! CU there
Allowing me control over my own creative work precisely does "promote useful arts and sciences". Turning creative work into a commodity with a fixed rate results in it becoming an industry, and likely a low-quality one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10