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Announcements Operating Systems Software Technology

Berlin Conf. On The Future Of The Digital Commons 73

Posted by timothy from the wish-I-could-go dept.
vgrass writes "More than 100 speakers from all over the globe will come together in Berlin next week to discuss free software, free content and free infrastructures at the Wizards of OS 3. The Future of the Digital Commons (10-13 June). Speakers include Ross Anderson, Larry Lessig, Michael Tiemann, Jimbo Wales, William Fisher, Charlotte Hess, Rishab Ghosh, Christoph Hellwig, Eben Moglen, Jah Shaka, Ethan Zuckerman, Doug Cutting, Ralph Giles & Wendy Seltzer. Specials will include the Launch of Creative Commons Germany and a joint statement to the European Commission urging them to implement a music flatrate."
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Berlin Conf. On The Future Of The Digital Commons More

Berlin Conf. On The Future Of The Digital Commons

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  • Oh thats right, Tradgedy of the Commons doesn't work for the "digital commons".
    • I feel that there is significant difference between Hardin's "commons" and this one.
      This is about an intellectual notion mixing business practice, copyright, artists rights, etc.
      Hardin writes of the very resources that support life itself.
      I'm sure, though, that some slashdot readers feel that their life would end if their technological 'commons' came to an end.

    • Re:no Hardin? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A tragedy of commons only exists where there is a finite, shareable resource.

      The digital commons represents an ever-increasing shareable resource.

      Big difference.

  • patent your mouth (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:04AM (#9354527) Homepage Journal
    I hope they also get around to making a joint statement against software patents. Seems like the pro-patent forces in europe keep popping up.

    • Re:patent your mouth (Score:5, Informative)

      by 4im ( 181450 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @04:08AM (#9354756)

      I agree, it would be a good thing for them to speak out against swpat.

      In related news, this Heise article [heise.de] (german) says that Janelly Fourtou, who was in charge of reviewing that IP directive, is under investigation for being biased on this question, as she directly profits by strong IP laws.

      I sure hope that heads will roll, and that things will be rectified - after all, the democratically elected european parliament went clearly against software patents.

      • Re:patent your mouth (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Janelly Fourtou' man is boss of Vivendi entertainment. She is member of the European Internet Foundation, http://www.eifonline.org.

        Just look at the bylaws. It's responsible for a lot of the European Parliament mess.
    • I'm serious, this is not a flame.

      Why do we need a digital commons? And why are so many people anti-patent?

      Patents ensure that the individuals or companies that invest time and capital to research and produce new technologies can profit from it. And time has shown (with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the market-based reforms of China) that profit is a greater incentive towards the common good than "communal" based economic systems.

      I understand the recent faux pauxs of the US Patent office and i

      • See patent articles [mit.edu]

        ---

        It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
        It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
        Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

      • Patents were designed to give *limited* exclusivity to an invention. Limited... you get exclusive rights for N years, then it gets thrown into the public domain. The patented idea, which was in the exclusive hands of one entity, is now available for everyone to use and build from. Unfortunately, if you have enough money, you can game the system to circumvent those time limits.

        As for "a digital commons", it all depends on what you mean by that term. Care to state your definition?

  • Why are they talking about music? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:13AM (#9354546)
    They should be talking about software patents. Although music rights are an important topic, They need to come hard agaist software patents. They need to point the EU to some of the patents that the USTO gives out. Tell them 5 years, then they will be patenting "light comes on when HDD active"

    We can talk shit about the Music Industry later.

    • Re:Why are they talking about music? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They should be talking about software patents

      They are. The program is largely concerned with patent and copyright issues (as well as good ol' Free Software) and makes absolutely no mention of the music industry.

      Program:
      http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=835&L=3

      Please mod parent down (-1, Willful Ignorance).

    • They are talking about music because, while patents, software or otherwise are important and need to be discussed, music is also important and needs to be discussed.

      Furthermore, addressing music is more important than directly addressing software patents because the general voting public doesn't see or care about the impact of or alternatives to software patents, but they sure care about their music. If the general population and the politicians see open licencing successful, and it manages to dominate di

  • List of names missing book publishers:Baen/Flint? (Score:5, Informative)

    by dvk ( 118711 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:16AM (#9354555) Homepage
    Looking through the names in the article, none jumped out at me as book publishers advocating free-er distribution of books. Looks lke Jim Baen (http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm [baen.com]) and/or Eric Flint (http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm [baen.com]) would be someone fitting pretty well in that event.

    -DVK

  • FYI: Wizards of OS Wiki (Score:5, Informative)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:16AM (#9354558) Homepage
    http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl [wizards-of-os.org]

  • For your convenience... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 3) profit!!! ( 773340 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:21AM (#9354566) Homepage
    A link to the english front page [wizards-of-os.org], since the submitter seems to not have realized that it was in german. ;)

  • Err, ok. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lharmon ( 786097 ) <rev_luke_harman@nOspaM.yahoo.com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:28AM (#9354579) Homepage Journal
    So they are going to sit around and talk about the "digital commons" (whatever that means -- I can only assume that it is all those blogs which so thoughtfully use Creative Commons licensing so that we can one day collect their best posts in a convenient coffee-table book format), and to what end? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Free Software movement get started without a "symposium" of "more than 100 speakers"? Didn't Open Source happen without a yearly conference? Hell, Project Gutenburg is probably older than many of the speakers -- the very same speakers who want to tell us all about free content, and how great it is, and what we can do with it, despite the fact that we already know all they could possibly have to say.

    You can take any bottom-up, individual-centered ideal, like those of the Free Software or Open Source communities, hold a conference on it, attended by maybe a few hundred people, and what's the end result? The vast bulk of people producing the quote-unquote content don't need to be told what to do, so they won't attend the conference anyway. The whole point seems to be to allow a (excessively large) number of speakers to indulge in pointless navel-gazing, all of which will be rercorded and analyzed ad nauseum by the other speakers in their weblogs. Free Software and Open Source geeks don't need to hold conferences, or have an agenda set by some cabal from above -- they do, quite simply, what they want, and that self-centered view has given us Linux, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and other great pieces of software. Why attempt to change that with some yearly "conference" and excercise in self-aggrandizement for a mish-mash of genuine techies and blogging "celebrities"?

    Seriously, I would like to hear from someone going to this, specifically as to why they are going, and what exactly they expect to achieve (other than writing more blog entries)?

    • Re:Err, ok. (Score:1, Funny)

      by unixbugs ( 654234 )
      I am going for the free beer.

    • The whole point seems to be to allow a (excessively large) number of speakers to indulge in pointless navel-gazing, all of which will be rercorded and analyzed ad nauseum by the other speakers in their weblogs.

      Bah! They might have some fun together...

      Imagine that!

    • I'm not going to this conference, but in my experience conferences are as much about the chance to go and share ideas informally with people working in related areas as they are the formal speeches. As well as being a spur to creativity, getting to know somebody personally and discovering they're not just a sardonic e-mail writer tends to reduce the level of flaming on mailing lists. And has it occurred to you that conferences might be just plain fun for the participants?

    • Re:Err, ok. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Renegade Lisp ( 315687 ) * on Monday June 07, 2004 @03:36AM (#9354707)
      I've been to many conferences in my career, and two things have been true about all of them:
      • they were beneficial to my work and my general education in a way that is hardly matched by anything else, e.g. a book or information from the web
      • they were usually not worth it for the actual program, the talks, etc. It was all about meeting the right people. The talks sometimes only seem to function as an alibi for that.
      I don't think the Wizards of OS will be any different, and yes, I think I'll be going there.

      • I agree completely. A fellow by the name of Harrison Owen also noticed this phenomenon and created an interesting way of holding conventions to try and take advantage of it. Far be it for me to play to /.'s biases, but there's a nice parallel between his methods and those of the open source community in terms of structure (or lack thereof). It would probably be a good match for meetings such as these.

        It's worth checking out: Open Space Technology [openspaceworld.org]

    • Conferences offer opportunities to learn. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Monday June 07, 2004 @04:43AM (#9354819) Homepage

      Free Software and Open Source geeks don't need to hold conferences, or have an agenda set by some cabal from above -- they do, quite simply, what they want, and that self-centered view has given us Linux, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and other great pieces of software. Why attempt to change that with some yearly "conference" and excercise in self-aggrandizement for a mish-mash of genuine techies and blogging "celebrities"?

      For free software advocates this is easy to answer: if you don't teach people to value software freedom, people will trade it away. We wouldn't have the free software community if it weren't for people doing the work of writing the software, but for some time the community has been expanding faster than we can teach people what makes this community so interesting; faster than we can teach the newcomers why we need to defend our freedom to share and modify software. Conferences help with this because people listen to interesting talks and get to ask questions they might not think to ask in e-mail.

      Not everyone will give that perspective on the issue (Eben Moglen probably will) but since they don't all share the same philosophy, one would expect there to be differences (your text doesn't clearly indicate that you understand the differences between the two movements). I've not seen any free software conference that had to do with celebrity creation or self-aggrandizement. I've seen genuine opportunities for learning and sharing. Very interesting conversations are started at these conventions and they always go beyond the conference rooms.

      Perhaps most importantly, conferences give the participants a chance to politically mobilize one another by talking face-to-face. The free software community is far less organized than it should be (particularly in the USA) about signficant threats including software patents. My experience with electoral politics (trying to get a local man on the ballot for Congress and then trying to get people to vote for him) tells me that face-to-face interaction is far more likely to get results than sending e-mail or trying to get someone to visit your blog. Electronic communication is very easily ignored.

      This conference is not just a free software conference, which is good. It places free software in a larger more significant context which includes media reform. This will help educate free software people on other related issues and give free software enthusiasts a chance to help others learn about our community.

  • Free Bitflows | What about the US? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Another interesting conference on a smaller scale was held in Viennal last week: Free Bitflows [t0.or.at]. Participants there were Brewster Kahle from Archive.org [archive.org] (with images of the Amsterdam PetaBox), Ian Clarke from Freenet [freenetproject.org], Musicians favoring fair [futureofmusic.org] and free [textone.org] distribution, and the organizer of Wizards of OS, among others. What are links to comparable events in the US?

  • Umm... question? (Score:4, Funny)

    by MachDelta ( 704883 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @02:44AM (#9354610)
    Does it make me any less of a geek if I have no friggin idea who any of those people are?

    We need trading cards or something.
    Hey! We could even make yet another geek convention around them too! Just imagine: The 1st Annual Geeks Collecting Geek Trading Cards Convention. That would make it the... AGCGTCC. Oh. My. God! Its like, DNA or something! That could be our theme! A big double helix for a logo, and giant stands of "geek DNA" all over the convention center! Of famous geeks too, like Einstein! Yeah! That would totally RULE!

    Wow, I am so brilliant, I even scare myself sometimes!




    (PS: Knowing my luck, someones already started this idea somewhere. That or one of you nuts will take it seriously and actually attempt it. I don't know which would be more hillarious... or frightening.)

    • Re:Umm... question? (Score:3, Informative)

      by merphant ( 672048 )
      FYI, here is the list of speakers [wizards-of-os.org], with a short description of each person.

    • Re:Umm... question? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Goonie ( 8651 ) * <robert.merkel@be ... g ['ra.' in gap]> on Monday June 07, 2004 @03:12AM (#9354666) Homepage
      • Jimbo Wales is the hugely benevolent dictator of Wikipedia.
      • Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Stanford and the main guy behind the Creative Commons.
      • Eben Moglan is another law professor and the FSF's legal guy.
      • Christoph Hellwig is a major Linux kernel guy.

      There's plenty of people on the list who I've got no idea about, but I get the impression that part of the idea behind this conference is getting coders, lawyers, creative arty types, and others together so they each get an idea of what the others are doing.

      • You know, the only reason Stallman has any credibility for his own ideas about giving away everyone else's creations for free is the enormous quantity of his own work he's given away. Who the hell cares what Rishab Ghosh, Jah Shaka and Wendy Seltzer have to say on this subject? If they want to cede rights to [whatever the hell it is they do], good for them, but I hardly imagine the rest of the creative world is going to be cowed by their brave moral stance.

        Certainly, as I get dressed to go to my Big Evil P

        • Certainly, as I get dressed to go to my Big Evil Pharma job and plan a minor clinical trial that will cost cost millions of dollars, I'm glad for the patent system that allows us to do that.

          So, going to hand your results over to the marketroids to publish your advert^W^W^W study? Going to publish at all if your results are negative? And, by the way, how much publicly-funded research was involved in the creation of that drug you're running the clinical trial of?

          • Rather than get sucked into a round of name-calling with another person who thinks that academic research produces drugs, or anything close to drugs, I'll simply point out the advantage of a market economy:

            If you prefer, feel free to buy your pharmaceutical products from Jah Shaka and Jimbo Wales. They know enough to hold a conference on putting me out of work; presumably they know enough to do better, right? When the day comes that we're being undercut by Ethan Zuckerman's Creative Commons-licensed product

            • Um, no (Score:1)

              by Goonie ( 8651 ) *
              I am well aware that there are dozens of blind alleys and very large sums of money (IIRC the figure is roughly a billion dollars - you undoubtedly can correct me) between an interesting piece of research and an FDA-approved drug. I'm just not convinced that handing a license to extort to Big Pharma is the best way to pay for that.

              And even if patents are the best form of regulation for the drug business, what makes you think that patents, and copyrights longer than a lifetime, are the best idea for other i

  • implement away (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    urging them to implement a music flatrate.

    What's a "music flatrate"? Some sort of price fixing, perhaps?
  • I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music. If there are monopolies and price-fixing, by all means break them up and institute sanctions, but more price-fixing isn't the way to go. As an individual artist I should have control over my own work, and it's not the government's role to say otherwise.
    • Why not? The government(supposedly the people in a western style republic) gave you the monopoly on your work in the first place.
    • I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music.

      Copyright was created to "promote useful arts and sciences". It was not created to allow you to determine how much to charge for your music, or just to give you control over your own work after you've published it.

      If developments in technology create an environment where the maximum amount of quality content is produced under a system where the artist does not individually set the price, then the government would be

      • Allowing me control over my own creative work precisely does "promote useful arts and sciences". Turning creative work into a commodity with a fixed rate results in it becoming an industry, and likely a low-quality one.

  • Jah Shaka (Score:5, Informative)

    by rasjani ( 97395 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @04:40AM (#9354810) Homepage
    Now there's a name that i wouldnt have ever imagine to appear on the pages of Slashdot.

    And for those who dont know this man, he is one of the Pioneers of the UK Reggae soundsystems and producers and still has alot to offer to the reggae fanatics worldwide!

    http://www.jahshakasoundsystem.com/ [jahshakasoundsystem.com]

    Give Raspect to His Majesty!

  • The future of the digital commons ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kcbrown ( 7426 ) <slashdot@sysexperts.com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @05:36AM (#9354923)
    ... is that there will be no digital commons.

    That's because almost all modern governments are either repressive dictatorships (e.g., China) or are completely bought and paid for by the big multinationals.

    The repressive dictatorships want to control the flow of information in order to maintain their power, and the big multinationals want to control the flow of information in order to maximize their profit.

    A digital commons is an anathema to both.

    And so, in time, the digital commons will disappear in a fog of eternal copyrights and patents. The USPTO today allows patents on everything, including (I seem to recall reading) things which were previously patented (where said previous patent has expired). This practice will continue and will get worse. And the EU will eventually mandate patents on everything (including software), too, since the EU Commission just has to keep approving it and sending it back to the EU Parliament until enough pressure has been brought to bear on the EU Parliament by the multinationals that they pass it. That won't take long -- almost everyone has a price, which means that almost everyone can be bought and paid for. Those that can't will probably tend to have "accidents" much more often than those that can.

    You think I'm too cynical? 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway.

    Look at the long-term trends. See if you can say with a straight face that I'm wrong after following the long-term trends to their logical conclusion.

    Richard Stallman's "right to read" dystopia is a mere hint of what's to come.

    • Don't remind me. Even if you predict the worst, you'll always be underestimating the extent of the problem.

      Poor Mr. Stallman would be rolling over in his grave, if he were dead.

    • I find it interesting how "multinational" has become a bad word. It is not just a company it is a "big multinational" run for your lives. Whereas other smaller companies are not held in such contempt. It is foolish.

      It is a mistake to say that big multinationals have bought out governments. Companies of all sizes have paying for legislation since before the American revolution. Most companies have formed industry groups to better lobby politicians. It is not just companies. Labour unions have been strongarm

    • Have a look at the manifesto and the other interesting selection of papers and ideas at The Libre Society [libresociety.org] that is trying to theorise these developments...

      Quite interesting....

      • Have a look at the manifesto and the other interesting selection of papers and ideas at The Libre Society that is trying to theorise these developments...

        What, is this a joke or something?

        The front page of that website reads like a the kind of management-speak bullshit that Dilbert-style middle management likes to spout. "The Libre Society is committed to theorising the copyleft, free/libre and open-source movements"?? And that's just the front page. I don't have the time to waste reading a bun

  • I really appreciate the coverage these events receive on Slashdot, but for people who aren't already in Europe it is a little short-notice to make arrangements. What I have searched for in vain is a comprehensive calendar of every single event of interest to the Open Source / Open Standards / Creative Commons community -- from OSCON to LUG monthlies.

    Here are a couple of useful Event links; if anybody has more please post or email eb.dnim@essej (sdrawkcab) - thank you!

    http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks

  • A really interesting conference I attended in Germany earlier in the year is worth looking at Neuro Conference [kein.org] which both theorised the free software/copyleft stuff but also put into practice the methods of self-organisation and networking.

    I went along and was fascinated to see how it all locked together and worked so well. The papers are on the Site here [makeworlds.org] and there are some really interesting reads.

  • who are about to use a slow connection...we salute you!...
    Ist hier die Verbindung auf englisch. [wizards-of-os.org]...or..."here is the link in English". Well, according to babelfish [altavista.com] anyway...
  • Next week, on June 18th, the dutch translation of the Creative Commons license will be launched in Amsterdam (see www.disc.nl [www.disc.nl] for more information). Lawrence Lessig will also be present. Let's share in Holland! CU there

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