Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age. Philippe Aigrain. Amsterdam University Press. 2012. In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. Sharing provides a new view of the value of peer-to-peer sharing… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2012"
Spinning the Online-Piracy Debate
Source: Christopher Shea – The Wall Street Journal BoingBoing announced with a flourish this week the arrival of “a study showing that feature films’ US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing.” That is to say, piracy wasn’t hurting ticket sales. This finding gibed nicely with the view of the author, Cory Doctorow,… Continue reading
Occupy Wall Street and the Peer-to-Peer Revolution: a discussion with Michel Bauwens Part I
Source: Action Foresight Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives , talks about Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement as an example of peer production. I was fortunate to catch up with friend and colleague Michel Bauwens in Chiang Mai in Nov. of 2011. It was truly inspiring to be with Michel, who I consider one of… Continue reading
Internet freedom and copyright law
Source: The Economist NO SOONER was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) signed than Kader Arif, the European Union’s chief negotiator, called it a “masquerade” and resigned. Slovenia’s envoy, who signed the deal at a powwow in Japan, called her own behaviour an act of “civic carelessness”. Romania’s prime minister (now resigned) admitted he couldn’t say… Continue reading
Declaration for the Defense of Society and Democracy
The following text, part of this petition campaign, gives an idea of the common sense in Greece concerning the crisis. Again the (main) question is the following one: is really all this a Greek crisis or Greece is just “etwas ganz Anderes” as it has been articulated by many mainstream German media? Greek society is… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Fork Freedom
Project site: http://fork-freedom.tumblr.com/ Tim Burden: “The alternatives to liberal democracy leave me wanting: communism puts too much power in the hands of the State; anarchy (or libertarianism) too much in the hands of the corporations. Neither seem to address the imbalance of power that we think is at the root of the current economic and… Continue reading
Conference on Global Censorship – Yale Law School – March, 2012
The Information Society Project is hosting a conference on Global Censorship at Yale Law School on March 30, 31, and April 1, 2012. We welcome your attendance at this exciting event. Censorship has long been a means to silence “harmful speech.” What governments consider to be “harmful” has varied across time and regime. Whether it’s… Continue reading
TrustCloud – Own your online reputation
TrustCloud is a company that offers a unique service. It measures – by your online activity – whether people trust you and combines several indicators into a score, to be used in online interactions that are part of the sharing economy. It isn’t quite functional yet, and it may not be to everyone’s liking to… Continue reading
Are we all Greeks?
Numerous protests have been taking place across Europe and USA, expressing solidarity feelings for the Greek people. “We are all Greeks” is the main slogan while many ask to get the Greek citizenship for symbolic purposes. I would like to cite two interesting, although -especially the second one- controversial Guardian articles (judging from the discussion… Continue reading
Podcast of the Day: Peter Waterman on on Twenty Years of International Labour Computer Communication
The Cyberunions Podcast Episode 31 The Tech 5th International: Waterman Interviewed on 20+ years of international labour computer communication. Source: http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/the-cyberunions-podcast-episode-31-the-tech-5th-international/
Stop SOPA, PIPA and ACTA!
Source: Mauro Vanetti – In defense of Marxism The Stop Only Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP Act, PIPA) are two bills that were put before the US House of Representatives and Senate in 2011. The two bills are supposedly designed… Continue reading
On Crop Mobs, and Starting One of Our Own
Source: Sean Keller The Media Timebank is about to try something entirely new, something that has, at least to my knowledge, never been done before. This spring, we are planning to start a Crop Mob and coordinate it with the Timebank. A Crop Mob is a group of people – whether experienced or inexperienced in… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Life’s Economic Survival Protocol
Book: Life Rules. Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it. Ellen LaConte Ellen discusses 9 aspects of “Life’s Economic Survival Protocol” that continuously puts life into upward spiral in spite of the geologic history of crises that life has faced. Her analysis is insightful and… Continue reading
Call for Papers: #OccupyCriticalTheory
One of the main achievements of the Occupy movement has been the opening up of new spaces of transformation, resistance and revolution, breaking the claustrophobic confines of the geography of global capital. The movement itself breaks the boundaries of accepted political terminology, opting to trouble the reigning order by speaking from a position outside of… Continue reading
Trend of the Day: Free Coworking
Felix Schürholz: “Coworking is going to evolve into “Free Coworking”. I predict that within the coming year you will see a marked increase in “Free Coworking” offers. What do I mean by “Free Coworking”? ”Free Coworking” means that as a coworking space user you do not pay for the use of the desk, chair etc…. Continue reading
Project of the Day: EcoFreek
Source: Eric Wilson In an attempt to broaden the reduce, recycle, reuse mantra, Ecofreek.com offers web denizens a portal to search for used items that are listed on the web. Numerous sites provide listings for free “stuff”, but sifting through all of them can be time consuming. Classifieds and Craigslist contain a wealth of gently… Continue reading