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.
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
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.