The sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanising framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape
The sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanising framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape
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iCommonsFelix CohenFelix Cohen at the iCommons summit 2007, Dubrovnik Having heard the party and caiprinha stories from Rio last year, I was eagerly looking forward to Saturday night at the iCommons. Some cliff-diving from the sea-facing bars was followed by a great dinner with Becky Hogge, David Berry and Tom Chance (amongst others) gave me a chance to discuss the philosophies of the commons further. We were also joined by Anna Berthold, the Prject Manager for virtual worlds at the USC center on Public Diplomacy, who briefly held court against Dave Berry on whether the corporeality, or lack there of, of Second Life made it more or less significant as a tool for public diplomacy. The debate was quickly overtaken by the table full of pizza-eating, red wine glugging commons-ers, but it's an interesting question and I hope we get the chance to hear more from Anna on it. Read the rest of this post...17 - 06 - 07
openDemocracyby Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007 June 13 2007 The philosophy panelists - Tom Chance, Dave Berry and Benjamin Mako Hill - brought to the open some of the rumblings set off by Lessig's keynote definition of what iC and CC are for. Dave Berry set up the opposition of the dwelling that the Free Software movement has created against the database that Creative Commons has created. Can iC/CC aspire to be a movement like Free Software, with its passionate sense of belonging and its spectacular impact on the world? Or is it - at the opposite extreme as characterised by David Berry - a way of supplying free labour to Web 2.0 capitalism? There were as many desires to express opinion as people in the room, so the debate continues on the iCommons site node. This morphed during the day into the organisational question: iCommons movememnt or cadre organisation? Does iCommons have Stallman envy? Yes and no. Larry Lessig responded in a realistic tone at the philosophy session: cultural production is not like software production, because it does not have a single purpose. Free Software has a purpose and unity that is created by compilers that run cross-processors. Where is the dwelling of ``free culture''? It is in each specific act of cultural production: from every local band to the writers' groups to the biennale or Covent Garden. Is there any reason to unite the Free Culture parts of production under one purpose - to make Free Culture itserlf a cultural product, not an object of study? That is what iCommons wants to do. I started these posts with the question: ``What is iSummit for''? It is here to support Free Culture, but also to unite Free Culture by giving it an identity. This purpose is being physically realised in its ambitious new web site, which aims to be a sort of cross between Sourceforge and Slashdot. It aims to bring under one domain representations of free culture production, while also distributing the goods of community - like visibility in the Free Culture world - according to a karmic currency. We look forward, at openDemocracy, to being an active part of this. tony curzon price 2007-06-16 16 - 06 - 07
Felix Cohenby Felix Cohen at the iCommon Summit 2007 The session on the philosophy of the commons this afternoon was fascinating. Despite some high-brow (or perhaps high falutin') language in some of the discussions, the feeling one was left with was of a movement that is struggling to define itself, but slowly realising how such a thing might be possible. Too many (in my opinion) analogies were drawn with the Free Software movement, but this finlly enabled people to discuss just how similar the iCommons movement is to free software. And as Larry Lessig pointed out in the first of many comments to be made about our philosophy as a movement, we are not the free software movement. Software is a 'domain' that lends itself particularly well to a core definition, as they have their 'leader' in Richard Stallman, and their licenses grew quite specifically from the principles that he had laid down. The Creative Commons licences, however, grew on many ways from the GNU GPL and other free/open licences for software, and the movement has never had a unversally agreed upon set of principles. However, Lessig argues, perhaps we will not be able to come up with unifying principles for the cultural commons, or free culture, as 'culture' is not a domain like software development, but a (poorly defined) umbrella for many different cultural activities and domains: from photography to music and with a thousand things between. Only by these individual domains coming to terms with what it means for them to produce free culture will we be able to move towards a set of unifying principles, although maybe not even then.
openDemocracyby Tony Curzon price at the iCommons summit 2007You know the argument -- in the post-copyright world, musicians will find other revenue sources, like live performance. Well, if the same will apply to academics, you can be sure that Jonathan Zittrain will find his place in that economy. Try to get to see Jonathan live: as a scholar/showman cross between Seinfeld and Jeremiah, he creates a great event. In his keynote on Friday, he recounted the epic of the witches that have been slain on the digital road to Oz. Closed systems, which grow only through central control, are out - success requires decentralisation. Or does it? JZ flashed up Steve Jobs' comments on the iPhone: we don't want it to be a computer, with all the vulnerabilities that implies, says Jobs. The whole system should be under tight central control, else how can we bring you the services that you want: music, banking, payments, communications without eavesdropping -- or at least only ``trusted'' eavesdroppers. The closed system is returning under the weight of malware. The attacks are destroying trust. We are fast depleting our innocence, and the world after the fall will be hard. SMTP will go like Usenet went. The solutions? A moderation of the unbridled individuality of our behaviour. The iCommons has ``i'' and ``commons''. Making sure that we do become a herd that filters, shares and supplies micro-effort to the commong good. If we can do it for SETI, we can do it against malware ...the details are in Jonathan's the forthcoming book.
16 - 06 - 07
Felix Cohenby Felix Cohen at the iCommons summit 2007 Lawrence Lessig appeared to backtrack, or at least clarify, a little on his 'two economies' notion in his keynote last night. While most of the the news and discussion was regarding his semi stand-down (and possible interest in working with Barack Obama?) Rather than the two cultures being somewhat mutually exclusive, Lessig talked about the way that content creators can move between the two cultures; they should be considered as 'modalities' which authors are in at any time, or that apply to certain classes of people's work. I'm happier with this discussion than I was with what appeared to be two very separate pools of people; now we have a Venn diagram with a lot of crossover and dynamic change. And this makes a lot of sense to some Creative Commons advocates (even Tom Chance seemed to have slightly softened towards him last night). I can understand it, as I find myself moving between the two economies for my work. All of my academic and discursive work is published under a Creative Commons licence, but work that I do in outside consultancy (I design cocktail menus) is rarely if ever released under free licences. Read the rest of this post...16 - 06 - 07
openDemocracyby Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007What is CC/iCommons? Lessig started answering the question during the keynote. It is:
And then he started telling us what it is not: ``It is not me, it is you!'' Before we knew it, we were listening to a near-farewell speech. For the next ten years, Larry wants to devote himself to the corruption of politics and public life by big money. Climate change ``knowledge'' has been on sale to the oil companies, for example, and the future of the world is being determined by $50,000 checks paid for friendly research. As Becky Hogge suggested in an emotional question session, Larry is moving from fighting for the infrastructure of the commons to being an activist within the commons. We often think of Creative Commons as being about music, remix, mash-up and art. But one of the most important--I would say the most important--tasks of society is to ensure that there is a realm for the production of creduble knowledge and opinion. Larry is moving into that realm, it seems, and if he can bring to us his energy, creativity and intellect to the cause of creating Coalitions of Credibility (CC 2.0?), then I'm more optimistic for the public realm than I was before his speech. 16 - 06 - 07
Felix CohenFelix Cohen at the iCommons 2007 Summit A long and exciting day at the iCommons summit today. Despite a late start (I can never get the hang of these pesky time zones!) this mornings workshop on supporting open content through membership campaigning was a success, and you can likely expect to see some of the ideas that we worked on being used in our next membership campaign! Following on from that, I had the chance to lunch with some fascinating people, including the leader of the GlobalLives project, who aim to record 24 hours of the lives of a representative group of people from all over the world and present it (under a Creative Commons licence of course). The project is very exciting, and you can look forward to further links between openDemocracy and the project. Read the rest of this post...15 - 06 - 07
Felix Cohenby Felix Cohen at the iCommons summit 2007 in Croatia Tony and I arrived at the iSummit last night, and after a brief dip in the Adriatic ocean to get rid of the travel blues, headed to the roof of the fantastic Revelin fortress in Dubrovnik to mingle with our fellow Commoners. It's a busy, very international conference, and most of the people I found myself talking to were national Creative Commons representatives, who had been at the lengthy legal sessions that day to discuss translating the new Creative Commons 3.0 licences into their local languages and make sure that there were no issues within their jurisdiction. Read the rest of this post...15 - 06 - 07
openDemocracy
Does CC destroy free culture? Business models panel presentation. I have a panel on business models this afternoon, and this is the presentation for it. A simple argument: - you need communities to make free culture, bothfor content and business ... both sense and cents - but creative commons copying is a diffusing force, taking people away from the community - solutions? technical , legal 15 - 06 - 07
openDemocracyby Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007 in Croatia ``What is the purpose of the iSummit?'', I asked as a disparate band of commoners jumped into a taxi to the centre of town. The question seems obvious: fortunate scholars have been flown in from around the world to an astoundingly beautiful Mediterranean medieval fortified town; the conference is professional, the drinks good and plentiful, the publications beautifully produced. This conference has been well funded. So to what end? ``When Heather [Heather Ford is the Executive Director of iCommons, the organiser of the iSummit] filled in the parts of the grant applications that asked for `measurable impacts', what do you think she wrote?'' Read the rest of this post...15 - 06 - 07
openDemocracyby Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007 in Croatia I was at iCommons Rio in June 2006. The habitual morning's bodysurfing on Copa Cabana was even more memorable than watching Brazil watching Brazil in the football world cup. But really memorable was the sense of a global movement coalescing around freedom of content, opened by Gilberto Gil humming his Bajia ode to freedom, and closed by Heather Ford telling us of the plans for the year ahead. So what has happened in the IP world during that year? I sent out a broad invitation for 200 words on the significant events and here they are. Send me your own, and I will add them. Read the rest of this post...13 - 06 - 07
Jessica ReedRonaldo of CCBrazil warned us in his opening speech that Brazilians are very good at organising parties, and that he didn't want to hear any complaints that there were too many parties at iSummit. He was true to his word last night, as we descended on what might be described as a samba palace/museum.
Three floors to explore, a busy dancefloor and generous bar has left many of us slightly the worse for wear on the last morning, but Ronaldo doesn't want to hear about it. Just want to say congrats to Ronaldo and his team for showing us all such a truly brazilian good time. 25 - 06 - 06
Jessica ReedThe wi-fi in the hotel hosting the conference has packed up for a reason no-one can explain, so liveblogging may not be as live as we'd wish. I've popped next door to use the shakey connection in our hotel to report on this morning's opening panel on strategies for an "international commons". Cory Doctorow opened with tales from WIPO with the simple message that just turning up at the organisation's negotiations in Geneva can have a powerful effect on what it does. The arrival of NGOs at WIPO is only a very recent development, and is already causing some seismic shifts. Even the simple act of writing down and blogging what is said at WIPO meetings produces responses from member governments and citizens, partially because the informal notes taken are more comprehensible than the secretariat's official-ese. The reps of developing countries are eager to hear the perspectives of NGOs, Cory says, because the only side they hear is from major right-holders bodies. Read the rest of this post...25 - 06 - 06
Jessica Reed The fascinating fight that is unfolding for me at the summit is the one 24 - 06 - 06
Becky Hogge I'm sat in the enterprise commons session, hosted by openbusiness, and the gloves are off. From warm, cosy ideas about sharing and freedoms and stuff, we're now in the land of markets and profit. I feel weirdly at home. Jessica ReedAt the culture/media commons panel this morning, we heard from Andre Szajman, the president of what is surely the coolest music company in Brazil, Trama. Created in 1998 with a philosophy that "music is our oxygen, we believe that it can help the country to develop the social and political understanding and conscience", Trama has evolved into an extraordinary portal and undertakes a wide variety of activities.It releases music by new and traditional Brazilian artists; built a digital download store two years before iTunes, and with no DRM; in 2003 launched a p2p promotion where you could win a prize if a certain mp3 was found on your harddrive; and is educating all its acts on the benefits of CC releases. It's also a music publishing company, offers tour management services, and is now the biggest indie distribution company in the country, working with other small labels and artists to distribute to retail outlets. Read the rest of this post... 24 - 06 - 06
Becky HoggeJamie Boyle, a Creative Commons board member and professor at Duke law school, opened todays proceeding with a rousing speech pointing out the mistakes people make when thinking about the digital commons.24 - 06 - 06
Jessica ReedThe whole conference went out to a churrasco (bbq) restaurant last night, and indulged in the widest variety of grilled meats I've ever been in the same room with. And, yes, caipirinhas. Here's BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow, who "doesn't drink much", but if you find yourself in front of a caipi professional, what are you going to do?
24 - 06 - 06
Jessica ReedA premature end to a terrific session on CC and the World Intellectual Property Organisation -- in some senses not too dissimilar from Tony's previous post about the Microsoft rep, but without any booing. WIPO director of copyright e-commerce Richard Owens set the stage, saying that he was pleased with the cooperation between CC and WIPO on issues of limitations and exceptions to rights in the digital context, and standardisation of DRM metadata. He also said the Development Agenda was underway with 110 proposals on the table, although he said nothing about US hostility to the DA's very existence. A quick mention of the Broadcast Treaty also failed to acknowledge how contentious it is. Read the rest of this post...23 - 06 - 06
Jessica ReedMartha Nalebuff seems like a nice woman. So why did the woman next to me inthe audience boo her, pelt her with paper, interject gasps of disbelief as Martha spoke? Because Martha was here at iCommons to explain Microsoft's decision to add a down-loadable module to Office that lets users easily insert a Creative Commons license into their spreadsheets, presentations and texts. Sounds innocent enough, no? Was Martha booed because there are crowds in which Microsoft can just do no right, or is there substance behind the knee-jerk? Gilberto Gil, 60's Bahia icon turned Culture Minister of Brazil, even Read the rest of this post... 23 - 06 - 06
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