[ox-en] Impressions from WOS4
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 17:10:22 +0200
Hi!
Leaving Berlin I'd like to share some impressions and insights from
the WOS4 with you. May be others who have been there want to do alike?
Sorry for no links here :-( . I made this also a Wiki page on
http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ImpressionsWOS4
I will add the missing links there when I find some time online.
================
General insights
================
There is one general impression from the WOS4:
.. pull-quote::
Free Culture is really coming!
It is slow yet and not very visible in all parts of culture but it is
definitely on the rise and with an increasing pace. After Free
Software and parallel to OpenAccess and Wikipedia I consider the very
broad topic of Free Culture is something Oekonux really needs to be
interested in.
There are a lot of similarities to Free Software at least for every
piece of culture which can be digitized somehow. For instance the
means of production are cheap and with the people - just as in Free
Software. For instance nowadays you only need a PC to remix video
material or music or even make (electronic) music.
Just as Free Software - and may be even more so - Free Culture
benefits from Free Flow of ideas and artifacts and the results of this
Free Flow of ideas definitely have the potential to outperform the
stuff that Hollywood and the music industry wants us to swallow.
Remixing is the norm in culture anyway. The Free Flow is facilitated
by the Internet on a global basis and in particular the
CreativeCommons licenses offer a firm legal ground to build this on
and to enable people to use material under clear legal conditions.
Another general insight the WOS4 gave me was how wide the idea of Free
Software spread meanwhile. It has been expected on one of the very
early Oekonux introduction slides that these principles will spread.
At this time this was not very visible but today it is probably hard
to overlook this general tendency.
================================
Panel: Open Source Biotechnology
================================
Biotechnology here means research and technology with affects the
basic building blocks of life like the genome.
The panel was interesting for me insofar as I learned that something
like Open Source Biotechnology is really more dangerous than anything
else. I mean while in Free Software the bugs fixed are virtual, fixing
bugs in biotechnology means killing real bugs - or other living
creatures. Though Free Software in a moral sense can be abused and the
information published in blogs can be abused this is actually anther
dimension than the potential to eradicate life on earth. On the other
hand there is certainly use in biotechnology. Like in no other area
the question here seems to be how something like Open Source
Biotechnology can be controlled in some way so the society as a whole
benefits from it and the collateral damages done are minimized.
In a way this is a similar question as what medicine is researched on.
In drug research you need money because the necessary equipment is
expensive and even if this could be replaced by cheaper solutions
things like clinical studies will probably stay expensive for some
long time. I.e. the question is: Where does the funding come from.
James Love proposed a global funding system which rewards and
remunerates inventors and drug developers on the basis of impact on
health care. To me this is simply a mechanism to (partially) counter
simple market logic where only those illnesses who can pay receive
research. Though on a moral level this is certainly something to be
wished for I can not see well what this has to do with the principles
we can see in Free Software.
The panel raised the question what role the "Open Source" in "Open
Source Biotechnology" actually plays. Is it just a label - or a
T-shirt as one panelist said -, does this really mean copying
principles from Free Software or does it mean adopting and transferring
them somehow. In fact as far as I understood in the Human Genome
Project [link missing] researchers need to return their research
results which are based on the material from the project. This is very
similar to Copyleft of course. Does things like that work in general?
While I think about it this is indeed a question which is the general
question for OpenAccess type of science which Open Source
Biotechnology is certainly a part of.
I'd also mention the BIOS project [link missing].
=========================================
Panel: Quality Management in Free Content
=========================================
One of the most interesting things in this panel was the announcement
from Larry Sanger to fork Wikipedia into a project he called something
like `citizendium.org` [link missing]. Larry Sanger were chief
organizer of Wikipedia during its first years and therefore knows the
project from the inside quite well. His main point was that Wikipedia
follows a ideology he called amateurism - which is probably a bad
thing for a encyclopedia. In particular there is no special place for
experts on a subject. Also the self-selection process common to Free
Projects leads to a special sort of conservatism because people who
select themselves to be in a project strengthen the existing culture
until a point where a fork is the only way to have something new. Thus
though he sees the attempts to maintain quality in Wikipedia because
of the unchangeable amateurism he still believes another approach is
necessary.
Larry Sanger described some of the rules `citizendium.org` shall have.
The most important probably is that there will be two roles: Ordinary
authors - which everyone can be (but without anonymity as in
Wikipedia) - and editors for a certain subject. Editors select
themselves but are benchmarked on publicly available material.
Personally I'd be astonished if this project really takes off - though
I share the concerns of Larry Sanger about Wikipedia. However, I think
this is nonetheless a very worthwhile attempt because it gives some
competition to Wikipedia and this may lead to better results in
Wikipedia itself.
I'd also want to mention a quote from Larry Sanger saying "Ontologies
and books are really personal things which can not be done
collectively".
=======================================
Workshop: Free Content Licensing Issues
=======================================
I'd like to mention the `FreedomDefined.org` project [link missing]
Mako Hill (panelist) is involved in. If I understood correctly this
project wants to define what Freedom means. Mako received a lot of
criticism for this endeavor from Lawrence Lessig (panelist) who said
that this is another type of colonialism telling others what freedom
means. The CreativeCommons project tries to help people to get the
best license for their particular needs. So for instance often they
help as license consultants and are able to refer people asking for a
special license to an existing license. On the other hand the project
develops special licenses if there is a need for it - like the remix
license [link missing] for music giving a very special set of
permissions.
On the question of interoperability of licenses Lawrence Lessig held
the position that there needs to be more than one license but
certainly less than ten.
I asked Lawrence Lessig for a license similar to the US public domain
legislation. He agreed with me that the concept of public domain does
not work really for instance for European countries. As the closest
license from the CreativeCommons license set he recommended the
Attribution license (CC-BY).
I also asked for a good license for a Wiki or similar massive
cooperative works. Mako pointed out that copyright is simply not made
for massive cooperative works and this type of brokenness probably can
not be remedied by a license. If I understood correctly Lawrence
Lessig recommended CC-BY for these instances as well with additional
regulation for the authors.
Admittedly I was a bit relieved by these answers because after some
discussions CC-BY is what we chose for the Oekonux Wiki and currently
this seems to be the best solution we could find.
===============================
Panel: Business and the Commons
===============================
As far as I attended it this panel actually was about businesses with
Free Music. One of the general believes which seemed to be held by all
the panelists was that paid distribution of music like in iTunes is
dead already (not growing any more). The music industry also keeps
complaining that the revenue from selling music online does not
compensate for the "losses" through "pirate copies". The panelists
seemed to share that since the decoupling of music from a physical
medium there is little chance to sell music media.
I'd like to mention the copycan.org project [link missing] which is
another project implementing the street performer protocol. There are
a couple of similar attempts already which so far all failed. May be
this one takes off - though I don't believe it.
Laurent Kratz from Jamendo [link missing] gave a very interesting talk
about his project. This is a business project offering Free Music on
the Web. This is done by giving a central platform to musicians where
they can hand in their album and they are published on the platform
under a Free License. The platform pays itself by ads. This works even
for CC-NC-* licenses because Jamendo uses a special contract where the
copyright holder gives Jamendo exactly this right.
The role of Jamendo is also that of a quality filter. Jamendo accepts
only complete albums including a cover.
Laurent Kratz said that for Free Music there is not a supply problem -
because there is a lot of Free Music. It is more a demand problem -
people just don't use the available Free Music. I'm sure that projects
like this help to change this.
During dinner StefanMz and I talked to Laurent Kratz. I asked him
about the quality of this Free Music. His answer was "Just listen"
|;-)| . Indeed this matches statements I heard before that the quality
of Free Music often is as good as proprietary music and often better.
So also here there seems to be room that quality of Free Project
results outperforms proprietary products.
He also compared the situation of Free Music to that of Free Software
during the 1980's. There were also little demand for Free Software but
over time the importance of Free Software increased enormously.
============================
Talk: The Read-Write Society
============================
This was one of the great presentations of Lawrence Lessig |:-)|. But
not only the presentation was great but also the content.
The main point of that presentation was that we currently see the
rebirth of a read-write society. This is a society where the masses
are not only consumers but also creators of culture. Lawrence Lessig
pointed out that until copyright it was quite normal for people to
create ("write") as well as to consume ("read") culture. The copyright
regime and the accompanying culture during the 20th century changed
that to a read-only mode where people more or less exclusively
listened to that what the broadcasters send them. The Internet and the
wide distribution of computers as machines enabling creative works now
reverses this again and everyone can publish.
DRM for instance is one of the attempts to preserve this read-only
culture. Lawrence Lessig pointed out that read-write culture has a
huge potential and using a very nice picture he showed that the
read-write culture is much bigger than the read-only culture.
He gave a few examples of this read-write culture showing several
films where people remixed stuff [link missing]. They gave the
audience a couple of very good laughs and this way showed the
practical value of this type of read-write culture |:-)|.
On the topic of how this read-write culture can be helped to grow he
made two points. The first one was to enable Free Culture by creating
Free Tools which are necessary to create Free Culture. Here he
emphasized the importance of Free Software for this enabling. On the
legal side licenses are needed to enable this Free Culture. The other
point he made was simply to create Free Culture.
Lawrence Lessig made an interesting remark about countries like Brazil
which are to a large degree still in the 19th century. In these
countries the read-only culture is not yet fully installed - if at
all - and so they can leap from one read-write culture to the next.
He also pointed out that the real potential of this modern read-write
culture is probably not yet visible. He gave a nice example of the
early days of filming where film people situated a film camera before
a stage and simply filmed a play on this stage. Only years later film
makers step by step discovered what can be done with this new medium /
technology.
Personally I am a bit sceptical about the close linking of pre-modern
read-write culture and cyber-mode read-write culture. Though I think
Lawrence Lessig has a point in pointing out that before copyright
there was a read-write culture I'm not sure whether this can be
compared with the current and future read-write culture. After
thinking a bit about it I think the difference lies in the
globalization of the current read-write culture. As far as I can see
the pre-modern read-write cultures were regionally limited - cultural
artifacts simply could not move at the speed of light. But they can
with the Internet. I think this is a big difference and I think this
difference is underestimated by linking these two to together to
closely. However, the nice point about this argument is that this
read-write culture is the "natural" way of culture - much more at
least than read-only.
=============================
Show: Show des Freien Wissens
=============================
This was really a nice event making a (German) TV like show about the
topics of Free Content. It has been televised and it probably is
available on the Web [link missing].
==================================
Panel: The Future of Free Software
==================================
Actually this was a panel on typical leftist questions about the Free
Software community. Two questions were about the participation /
contribution of women and of people in poor countries. The third
question was about Free Software oriented in the needs of the users.
About the question of women participation the main line of
argumentation was that by how women are raised software ranks very low
on average women's list of hobbies. Therefore they are rarely keen to
engage in Free Software.
The main explanation given for the huge underrepresentation of Indians
(in India) in the Free Software community was that in India working
with software and computers is largely seen as a job and nothing which
one would do in the spare time. This also was said about women.
As far as the orientation to user needs was concerned the panelists
said that Free Software always oriented in user needs - only the users
changed. However, the (potential) users can help here very much by
giving their domain knowledge to Free Software developers helping them
to write software suited to their needs.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
--
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
and send out in the evening of the day it is written. It
does not take any information into account which may have
reached my mailbox since yesterday evening.
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