Michel,
As an Asian maybe I can contribute on this particular issue..my two
cents....some regimes in Asia allow that whatever IPR are followed in
the US, they are automatically transmitted to that country, in this
case I would like to mention India and its IPR is protected in the US
vice versa.
Within my country, Pakistan.........there is no regime for software
patents and only a logically and mutually understood declaration that
there is a copyright for ideas and software is an idea though its
source code has to be printed out and submitted.......which is not in
practice.....anyways..........the only use for Free software and its
freedoms are widely acceptable due to the widely prevailing software
piracy and of course software piracy itself is widely pushed and
governments pressureized by the Multinational Giants and we know who
in this case......
Currently innovation seems to be need driven mostly based around
individual needs and not as a collective or national or societical
need in our region. Research itself in this part of the world is not a
contributor to national industrial development. These two sectors
operate in silos and where the govt may try to intervene, red-tapism
delays the process and multilaterals do talk a lot and pour in
billions but that only holds such regions in further debt and
international scrutiny....
Anyways, though we are very different from European countries, there
is one common understanding, the perception of technology and its
benefit is significantly the same but the area of conflict is that in
our regions of mass population where Hunger and the stomach drives our
pursuits for everything, innovation and technology in general comes
down to be second because the population neglects the
opportunity..............
Interesting discussion though, by the way, my name is Fouad Bajwa and
I am a South Asian FOSS advocate and campaigner for free software!
Best
Fouad
Then there are countries
On 9/21/08, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 gmail.com> wrote:
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I think this is of interest here as well, see
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-northern-and-southern-roads-to-post-industrial-development/2008/09/21
Michel Bauwens:
"In any transition, three phases can be recognized: 1) the pioneering
phase
which takes place in the dominant countries of the old sphere (example:
emergent of merchants in feudal/imperial Spain and Portugal); 2) a
revolutionary/evolutionary phase: the revolution takes place at the
periphery (i.e. the merchants take power in Holland and England), while
in
the former dominant countries, an evolutionary caste merger takes place.
But
the countries where the revolution takes place, become the new dominant
power centers. Example: the workers revolution's took place at the
periphery
in Russia and China, but in the West,the elite of the worker's caste
merged
with the merchant class to form social-welfare with technocratic
capitalism.
Now to my own point. Think of the new OSCAR open source solar car
project.
Who in the West would be interested? It seems unlikely as workers would
take
a pay cut, and capital would be weary of operating without the IP
projection
that guarantees state-protected extra profits. But what of the Asian
capital
owners, who are in any case already illegaly copying many IP-protected
designs. Why would they not be interested in taking up such copyright
free
designs? I see such an evolution as a distinct possibility." (
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-true-p2p-revolution-may-not-happen-in-europe-and-america/2006/12/25
)
[edit<
http://p2pfoundation.net/Leapfrogging_to_Post-Industrial_Development?title=Leapfrogging_to_Post-Industrial_Development&action=edit§ion=3
]
Eric Hunting on Concurrent Development
Open production will be developed concurrently but separately, in the
more
industrially advanced Western countries, vs. the rest of the world.
Eric Hunting:
"No question, the developing world and the urban poor are going to
benefit
more sooner from Post-Industrial technology and community systems than
western people. So, yes, this stuff does seem to indeed make far more
immediate sense to pursue elsewhere. There it is an immediate matter of
life
or death. But the knowledge and skill pool that must be tapped into to
cultivate these technologies, designs, and systems is largely here in the
west, embodied by middle-class technical professionals. So, in fact,
these
things do have practical importance here. We're learning the necessary
skill
set to move beyond an increasingly decrepit model of civilization into a
new
one as well as re-learning the skill set we need to effectively interact
with the rest of the world in a viable way -to stop the knuckle-headed
patterns of relating to the world that produce perpetually ineffectual
relief efforts. That may not be a matter of life or death in the here and
now for western people, but it's still a practical pursuit in that it is
necessary for the purpose of harnessing the knowledge pool of the
middle-class for the purpose of developing those technologies we wish to
deploy elsewhere.
To put it another way, Post-Industrial technology means different things
to
people in the west and to people in the rest of the world. In the west
this
about re-asserting control of our own lives through the assertion of
control
over the basis of our standard of living and re-establishing the lost
skills
and culture of community in the process. As a dividend, we potentially
recover huge amounts of personal time sacrificed to other people's profit
we
can re-invest in amplifying this pursuit. Elsewhere, this is about
establishing a means to, at first, survival, and ultimately an entirely
new
standard of living. And even between the urban and rural poor in
industrialized countries and in the rest of the world there are great
differences in the context of the situations people are subject to and
so,
again, these technologies will have different meanings in each situation.
People are not poor for the same reasons everywhere. If subscription
farming
works somewhere else besides middle-class towns in Europe it will work
for
very different reasons and probably not exactly the same way. This will
be
the case for most Post-Industrial tech.
We cannot create a model Post-Industrial community that works in the west
that also works in the rest of the world too. We can't engineer this like
a
tin can lunar habitat to be mass produced and dropped by spaceship all
over
the world. All we can do is cultivate a collection of technologies that
are
relatively adaptable and modular and can thus be repurposed in local
contexts. (and we can't always control how that's going to turn out.
OScars
WILL be turned into 'technicals'. All we can do is hope that,
collectively,
the technology we disseminate precludes the compulsion to do that most of
the time)
So the pursuit of Post-Industrial community development in the west and
for
the rest are -at least- two completely different, if related, pursuits
with
different purposes. They may share common technology but that's about it.
Very different strategies must be employed in each context.
Post-Industrial
technology is nascent. We've barely started on the means to replicating
our
tools. It can do a lot of good right now and that's worth pursuing, but
it's
nowhere near enough. There are too few of us to matter. So what's
important
now is accelerating the pace of the technology development so it can be
disseminated to the rest and be independently perpetuated there, and
right
now that's a job we have to start predominately in the west, were the
knowledge is. This will be more two-way in the future as outreach efforts
have impact, but right now the flow of technology is still predominately
west-to-the-rest. So the logical purpose of the western Post-Industrial
demonstration community is creating an environment optimized for
recruitment
and innovation -NOT creating a model to replicate in Africa- to encourage
as
many people as possible to participate in this tech development. Such a
community may specifically pursue technology appropriate to the
developing
world as part of its agenda. But you won't get that many middle-class
technical professional participants willing to trade their own standard
of
living for the privilege of participating in that. To harness these minds
to
their fullest potential means providing the largest number of them
possible
with an environment that frees them from squandering their time on mere
subsistence -or turns their activity into a means, and incentive, to
realize
that freedom. And THAT's why creating these infrastructures in the west
is
just as important as doing it elsewhere. (this, of course, is the very
same
reason TMP2 pursues the cultivation of a Post-Industrial society. It's
that
productivity dividend it banks on for eliminating the drag of Earth's
chronic problems and for freeing society to pursue space. Spaceship Earth
has no ejector seats or lifeboats. We get our act together here or we
never
get anywhere else. This is a surprisingly radical point of view in the
space
advocacy community)
Develop here. Deploy there. Two very different tasks in two very
different
environments. They can be pursued concurrently, but the technology
remains
under-developed and flows predominately from the former to the latter
right
now and so optimizing that is the immediate priority." (
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-northern-and-southern-roads-to-post-industrial-development/2008/09/21
)
[edit<
http://p2pfoundation.net/Leapfrogging_to_Post-Industrial_Development?title=Leapfrogging_to_Post-Industrial_Development&action=edit§ion=4
]
Jeff Buderer
"The reason for leapfrogging is simple from my perspective. Disruptive
technology development has undercut the competitive advantage of
industries
that are reluctant to find effective and empowering solutions for
communities because they are afraid of losing control and power of the
global economy. The notion that large scale corporate level economies of
scale are needed to produce products and services is being challenged in
this process. The notion of the modern more self-reliant community is
emerging (as part of the process of developing a strategy to create a
globally sustainable society/civilization). Developing regions may have
the
advantage because the economics of stranded costs (as well as related
social
factors that inhibit real innovation and change at the community level in
developed regions) is keeping the developed nations from effectively
retooling their economies and societies to take advantage of the
potential
P2P revolution.) as competitive alterantives to existing top down
approaches.
A country which has limited infrastucuture is like a empty slate and thus
there is less need to deal with entrenched vested interests that are
seeking
to preserve the status quo at least in terms of modern economic sectors
in
terms of the allocation of the resources. For example the phone industry
while often monopolistic in these regions, usually has not developed a
mature set of services such as in the case of telecoms; extensive land
line
coverage for internet and phone service. One of the positive aspects of
neoliberalism has been pressure put on these countries to encourage more
innovation and competitiveness in the economic sector. For P2P and Open
Source solutions in these regions to be utilized and effectively deployed
they have to be enabled by a free market/open society
social-political-economic infrastructure that is not hobbled by the law
of
vested interests/corruption. If that structure for "free and open play"
is
not in place then, economic vested interests will continue to dominate
with
the support of the political elites in these regions and it be business
as
usual.
We are dealing with this very reality in Ghana where wireless broadband
is
maturing and is becoming more competitive with fixed wired broadband
solutions there is an emerging battle between small scale wireless
networks
and the large dominant telecoms.
Similar battles are emerging in every sector of the economy in every part
of
the world, a reversal of open society processes in societies around the
world could put that process in jeopardy. Because for P2P technologies to
emerge (and for the leapfrogging model Michel outlined in the beginning
of
this thread) as competitive alterantives to existing top down approaches
we
need a free market. Another we need to consider is the political
realignment
that will complement this process and the need to better organize that
process by seeking third way political parties that overcome to tired and
worn out us verses them zero sum thinking that typified the modern mind
whether at the institutional or the personal and individual level. The
two
are indeed interconnected and symbiotic in creating a dysfunctional
world.
Regarding (I think it was Dave's comment...) The questioning of
appropriate
and disruptive technologies is to some degreee appropriate as we cannot
be
sure that technologies developed in this way will not be coopted and used
to
further cement corporate and top down domination and also to genuinely
create a more sustainable society. We have to constantly challenge
ourselves
and to ask the tough questions: are we really part of the solution or
just
putting forward more of the same flawed thinking that got our societies
to
the point where they are now." (email, September 2008)
--
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