Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
urging them to implement a music flatrate.
What's a "music flatrate"? Some sort of price fixing, perhaps?
Jimbo Wales: the man behind Wikipedia, a free, open-content, online encyclopedia?
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
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
A tragedy of commons only exists where there is a finite, shareable resource.
The digital commons represents an ever-increasing shareable resource.
Big difference.