Great summary of the filesharing issue and how to solve it by marrying consumer interests and artists income alike. Source: Open Letter to Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills (UK). By Gerd Leonhard, October 12, 2009 “Dear Lord Mandelson, The proposed “3 Strikes” legislation is flawed in… Continue reading
Progress on the dataportability front
data portability and the trust it engenders are key to fueling the growth of the open web Webmonkey has an interview with Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick, the lead of the dataliberation front project, which aims to make all data put into Google systems portable, and easy to get out again. From the intro, an excerpt on… Continue reading
Open City New York: an update by Matt Cooperrider
Below is a response from Matt Cooperrider, organizer of the Open Government NYC meetup group to a previous article about open cities. “While Mayor Bloomberg’s recent initiatives are innovative and forward-looking, perhaps his most valuable role for the openness movement in New York CIty has been as a foil. This is a mayor so strong… Continue reading
The Planning of the Meltdown
When the history of the end of the neoliberal era will be written, Matt Taibi’s investigative reporting will be centrally featured. In his latest contribution to Rolling Stone, the machinations behind the fall of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are detailed. It’s a must read essay that makes for gripping reading, with the unfortunate conclusion… Continue reading
A call to the Pope to support Open Access
In his latest encyclical letter Pope Benedict XVI argues that rich countries are asserting their intellectual property with “excessive zeal”, especially in the field of health care — a statement that has led some to conclude that the Pope has been converted to the Open Access (OA) cause. Whether or not this is the case,… Continue reading
The economic rationale for ‘collaborative goods’: complementing Ostrom
Mark Cooper could easily have been the third leg of the stool of the recent Nobel Prize for economics, which rewarded research into the economic rationale of non-market modes. Thanks to Jaap van Till for reminding us of a commentary on a landmark essay on the rationale for choosing collaborative goods. The commentary by Harold… Continue reading
Why Monetary (Re-)Design is Important
Great explanation by Eric Harris-Braun of why the design of currency is so important. “Recently I’ve had some discussions about our MetaCurrency work with folks trained in economics. For some reason it seems particularly hard for some of them to grok what we’re up to. More than once I’ve been told that working on changing… Continue reading
Supporting indigenous communities and biodiversity against the enclosure of the commons
For indigenous communities, biodiversity has always been a local, commonly shared resource on which they have been dependent for their livelihood. The current moves in many countries of the South to introduce new intellectual property laws under the GATT/WTO agreements to, in effect, ‘enclose’ these ‘commons’ and bring them under a regime of private property… Continue reading
Are Generic Biologics Impossible?
Democracy in Action is hosting a campaign for the inclusion of a workable path towards the approval of generic versions of biologics, into healthcare reform legislation. Apparently, biologics are more than 20 times as expensive as your normal run-of-the mill pharmaceutical drug. There seems to be a certain reluctance on the part of pharmaceutical producers… Continue reading
The mutualization of news: the Guardian’s Trafigura case
Editor Alan Rusbridger starts this interesting article by summarizing the recent censorship incident in the UK, and how Guardian readers helped the newspaper circumvent it: “Recently, I was confronted with a legal obstacle that—possibly for the first time since we were founded in 1821—prevented The Guardian from reporting something that had happened in Parliament. We… Continue reading
Where Freeloading Fails
When it comes to the commons, freedloading can be a major issue. Freeloaders are those who benefit from the shared resource and yet put nothing back in to the commons. There have been a number of methods and ideas implemented to try and avoid the growth of freeloaders; for example the 4i method. Now an… Continue reading
Openmoko: Open Phone, Open Software
There is an intriguing project I heard about recently; Openmoko – the project is interesting as it combines the development of open source software alongside open source hardware and aim together to make an open mobile phone. The project has produced one handset thus far, the Neo FreeRunner (you can see it in3D here). The… Continue reading
Controversy about Kiva’s P2P Microlending model
Via Tactical Philanthropy) David Roodman wrote a post on his Microfinance Open Book Blog titled “Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems“: the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this. Yet Kiva prides itself on transparency. Roodman argues that while Kiva is misleading… Continue reading
Freedom of Speech: Peer-Style
There are been a number of recent developments around the issue of freedom of speech that should be noted. First off was the victory against a secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura. The UK press could not report on any of the details of the case – including the company in question… Continue reading
Open Sourcing Progressive Campaigns through Data Portability
Both data portability and open source software are essential to guaranteeing user freedom with cloud based services A very important appeal and proposal by Jason Lantz. Read it in full here. “How does this relate to political campaigns? The current thinking about data ownership in campaigns is that the campaign owns all the data produced… Continue reading
Debating Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government
Full public transparency is not all good, argues Lawrence Lessig in a substantial critique of what he calls the “naked transparency movement”. It’s a must read for all openness advocates, and published in the New Republic. In short, Lessig’s argument is that transparency have many ill-considered side effects, and that transparency reformers should take responsibility… Continue reading