Interesting editorial by copyfighter Cory Doctorow for the science-fiction magazine Locus, which distinguishes the para-copyright culture and norms of sharing circles and the copyright law of the industry. An excerpt: “Copyists either know that they infringe but don’t care, or they believe that the law can’t possible criminalize what they’re doing and assume that it… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2008"
The professionalization of p2p video politics
First, have a look at the Political Video Barometer, to see the rising professionalization of metrics regarding the spread of political videos. Then watch this video discussion flagged by Cause Global, where it is argued that “the internet has killed Karl Rove politics”: “”Check out this panel discussion from today’s Web 2.0 Summit in San… Continue reading
The financial evaluation of reputation
This contribution by Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor of Law (Spring 2009) at the Yale Law School is a reponse to the earlier contribution by Adam Arvidsson, entitled Ethics, Finance and Crisis. In this text Adam stated: “the present crisis was preceded by a boom that built essentially on the securitization of life conduct, where the… Continue reading
Announcement: The Networked Politics seminar
A summary of the announcement, but with a focus on explaining the important four lines of inquiry. In broad terms, the Networked Politics initiative is an inquiry into the shift from centralized and hierarchical forms of organization towards decentralized and horizontal forms from the perspective of new ways of organising for social change. The goals… Continue reading
Will Obama be an open source president?
Via Sean Fitzgerald’s blog. I have already assembled a substantive amount of material on this issue via our Delicious tagging system: P2P-Elections, focusing on the usage of social media to get elected. The issue now is how the governing will be changed as well. Sean points to a video from CNN, outlining this issue, and… Continue reading
Italian conversation with Tiziana Terranova on peer to peer
Tiziana Terranova, known for her earlier interventions on how peer production is also used as free labor, has conducted an interview with me, more of a conversation really, as her input is just as elaborate as my replies. Selections of that interview have been published in the Italian newspaper “Il Manifesto”. Here’s the more extensive… Continue reading
Know Thy Enemy: the strategy and tactics of IP maximalists
Commentary on the report: THE GLOBAL IP UPWARD RATCHET, ANTI-COUNTERFEITING AND PIRACY ENFORCEMENT EFFORTS: THE STATE OF PLAY. by Susan K. Sell URL = http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/intellectual_property/development.research/SusanSellfinalversion.pdf IP Maximalists are those who want to strengthen Intellectual Property protections to the maximum amount possible, to protect private monopoly interests, in disregard of any human cost, such as the… Continue reading
Alternative Media Global Project’s Map
Via the Networked-Politics blog: This worldmap seeks to graphically display the location of any alternative, radical, citizen, participatory, community (etc.) media project in the world. The purpose of this work is to create an interactive chart of the world of alternative media. This project is a part of the Alternative Media Global Project. Contact :… Continue reading
20 proposals to get beyond the crash
Via Jeremy Williams‘ blog “Make Wealth History“: “I read a really good report tonight on the train home, ‘From the ashes of the crash – 20 first steps from new economics to rebuild a better economy.’ It’s from the New Economics Foundation (nef), and you can download it here. The report, which you can read… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Digital Virtues (2): The Catholic Church, Technology, and Free Software
On the occasion of the congress on free software and education, organized by the Salesian teaching order in Quito, Ecuador, Father Julian Fox, author of this book on Digital Virtues, also gave a very interesting presentation, part of which we reproduce here. It’s theme is what an institution like the Catholic Church, can do for… Continue reading
The Art of Participation exhibition in San Francisco
Via Kevin Flanagan: “There is exhibition at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art called ‘The Art of Participation’ which looks at the history of participatory practice in contemporary art. For a good 50 years now artists have challenged the ‘institution’ of art, blurring the boundaries between art and life, artwork and audience. In a… Continue reading
Nef’s realistic policy prescriptions for the meltdown
One of my favourite think thanks is the New Economics Foundations, because for the last 20 years it has been tackling global problems in an integrative and integrated way, thinking together solutions for the economy, the environment, and the politics of participative innovation. Now that many governments actually have unprecedented control of the banking system,… Continue reading
Italy: TFF promotes Direct Democracy
The italian-based Telematics Freedom Foundation promotes a more direct and participatory idea of the democratic process. Some of the immediate targets are – user-controlled telematics services – self-management of democratic organizations and – national and constitutional legislative changes to support the widespread introduction of software-based democratic interaction. Direct Democracy or ‘Continuous Democracy’ is promoted through… Continue reading
A new politics of expression: the Video Republic
In case you missed this last month: Commentary by Celia Hannon in Open Democracy: “In April 2007 charlieissocoollike, a 16 year-old vlogger from Bath joined YouTube. So did the British Prime Minister. Since then Charlie has amassed 70,000 subscribers. The Prime Minister has 5,000. These figures betray a very naked truth – young people are… Continue reading
An estimation of the value of open source software code
Glyn Moody reports on a financial estimate of the value of open source software projects in terms of their code. You can find the technical details of the methodology, in his article. The full paper of the Linux Foundation is here. Here are some of the astounding results: we estimate that it would take approximately… Continue reading
Is it time to go beyond Wikipedia?
One of our more popular blog entries, which seems to have a long afterlife and is still generating comments (over 30 so far), is our commentary on the Wikipedia governance issues: Is Something Fundamentally Wrong with Wikipedia Governance? One of the latest contributions, by Wird Krapht, deserves an upgrade to a full editorial, so here… Continue reading