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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."
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
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?
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.
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