Date archives "November 2010"

Innovating through the Common

Gerry Canavan reports on a talk at Duke entitled “The Decline of the Anti-Commons”, by Christopher Newfield. Excerpt: “The talk explored two alternative models for scientific innovation. The first, the dominant model in our moment, is the linear paradigm that employs limited public funds to generate privately held intellectual property within a market context. When… Continue reading

How does the idea of p2p and the commons differ from the socialist tradition?

In the article for the Argentinian national daily “Pagina 12”, journalist Mariano Blejman writes that I equate open hardware with socialism. and this is also the message that is being retweeted. This is not explicitely my position, so I’d like to take up the occasion to republish an earlier article on how our position is… Continue reading

Productive Paradigms in the Digital Era: on two-sided markets and peer production

With the development of information technologies, information has become the centre of production. Due to its specific characteristics consumption externalities are frequent. Internalization of these externalities has lead to different strategies to internalize them. Peer-to-peer can be understood in this context.

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Summary theses on the emergence of the peer to peer civilization and a new political economy

I wrote these summary theses about two years ago, but I believe they are still valid, food for thought, and show the specific approach I’m proposing to politics, state and governance issues: 1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization: a) it is based on a false concept… Continue reading

Internet Time (1): Stowe Boyd on the enduring myth of attention scarcity

Excerpted from Stowe Boyd: (the counterargument on internet as mental pathology is here) “This thread of Western philosophical discourse — attention scarcity, future shock, information overload — has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic? The framing of the argument includes the unspoken… Continue reading

First article about open hardware ever published in a Spanish-language national newspaper?

Una nueva estructura de producción y circulación de la información, que será libre, abierta y distribuida Argentinian journalist  Mariano Blejman believes this is the first article about open hardware ever published in an spanish-language national newspaper, in Argentina in this case. Is this true. References about previous publications would be welcome. The original article is… Continue reading

On the licensing (and other) difficulties of open hardware: upcoming book by John Wilbank

Copyrights enable from a rights perspective, while patents exclude. Copyrights are relatively international while patents are nationally defined. Very few people have the capacity to practice a complex technology, while many have the capacity to take and share a photo, edit Wikipedia, or write code (even though the vast majority of people do none of… Continue reading

Heidi Williamst on the human genome: the study that broke the myth of the innovation effect of Intellectual Property restrictions

The Las Indias “Indianopedia” english article on Devolutionism writes: Devolutionism is the defense of the progressive legal reduction -until its total disappearing- of the economic monopoly for patents, copyrights and other intellectual property forms, expanding the public domain with the creations of the last decades. Devolutionism has won its theoretical maturity with the works of… Continue reading

Niko Paech: Elements of a post-growth economy

Food for thought: (thanks to Brian Davey for sending this text) Dr. Niko Paech: “the concept of post-growth economics rests on the following premises: * No ecological uncoupling of economic growth measured in money is in sight. In an expanding economy, “boomerang effects“ wipe out advances in de-materialisation or ecologisation as result of growing demand…. Continue reading

Examining the ethics of human rentals and the moral need to create cooperatives

This is certain a complex conversation, but worth the effort of deep listening, and it may change your view on the ethics of ‘renting’ human labour, and makes a strong argument for the necessity of cooperatives. It is part of a series of four which you can find here. The playlist function will probably loop… Continue reading