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Lessig on Digital Barbarism
Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.
Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more
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What is iCommons?
Jamison · Oslo (Norway) · Jan 14th, 2008 9:08 pm · 17 votes · 9 comments
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At this link find a description of how to build a bottom-up social movement. At this link find an article on how iCommons sees itself governed. At this link find a letter written by Mike Shaver, chief evangelist at the Mozilla Corporation.
Mike Shaver writes:"Creative Commons has produced a set of licenses that helps not only software developers, but photographers, musicians, authors, bloggers, videographers, poets, DJs, painters , documenters, and journalists. This means that anyone who produces a creative work, which is virtually everyone on the planet, can share their work in ways that they choose."
On this iCommons wiki you'll see that a community governance document is being drafted. There is no wiki asking the community to be involved in creating any kind of ideology that governs iCommons (yet?).
At this link find a call for the summit to more scientific. At this link find out that science has it own commons. At this link find an article asking 'what is art to iCommons?'
iCommons' mission currently is "iCommons.org’s mission is to provide a valuable service to the global commons community by providing valuable information and networking tools to the social entrepreneurs that make up this movement."
How many social entrepreneurs within the iCommons community depend on using Creative Commons licences to distribute their art/creativity? How many intellectuals/ creators/ artists define themselves as social entrepreneurs? What about the valuable information and networking tools for the people that Mike Shaver from Mozilla mentions?
According to an interview at this link link Ronaldo Lemos chairman of iCommons says. "iCommons is made for those connected to Creative Commons .....iCommons is the movement, Creative Commons is the legal project".
If Creative Commons is the legal project, why does Creative Commons not have a meeting that brings all those interested in the legal aspects together? If Science Commons is focused on the intellectuals within the movement, why partly not the same? Is it part of the iCommons mission to bring the users of the licences together?
Is the Creative Commons movement made up by those that licence their creativity with a Creative Commons licence or by those that create the bureaucracy around the licence? According to the description of "how to build a bottom-up social movement". Step 2 Appoint (not elect) members of the board and employees.
A festival that brought creators that used Creative Commons licences and those that create platforms for that creativity could happen in many different parts of the world at different times of each year. Its a huge expense to fly people from all around the world to a remote part of Japan to gather and talk about free culture. How do those outside the iCommons movement and those on the fringe of this movement view this?
Are the non-professional/part time/ full time artists and creators that licence using Creative Commons going to be fairly represented at future summits and events?
tags: oslo norway policy-law icommons bottom-up-social-movement
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If the last summit was in Zagreb or maybe Berlin and this summit in Tokyo I reckon more people would find out about Creative Commons/open source. Having meetings off the beaten track means that people only involved in the movement come to the meeting. These summits don't have to be just about the people involved in the movement, when you bring all these people together they want an audience. At the last summit i saw people flown from Australia talking to less than 20 people (about interesting ideas and things happening). Language barriers in countries like Japan and Croatia make it a better idea to have these summits in populated dynamic cities. Festivals (CC Saloons) would be better suited to bring this movement to places further out (maybe?).
I also reckon that the emissions might be considered when having an event (any event) away from a capital city. I'm not sure if your able to fly direct from Europe or US to Sapporo. If not, you have to also consider that short flights use a lot of Co2's. Multiply that by 400 people and its something worth considering. I noticed the CC bag this year is to to be made of hemp, has consideration been made to make this event carbon neutral?
open culture sensibility? Is Icommons attracting much traffic to the website? ( having events in highly populated areas like Tokyo would create more media interest. Unexpected people might find out about Creative Commons and join in. The website (to my eyes) has been set up for the people that come to summit, it provides little resource to people new to the open source. If an artist/creator that knows nothing about the open source comes to this site. Are they going to register? should this not be the focus of the site? These kind of things are important
* Projects
* Governance
* People
* Policies
* Funders
* Opportunities
* Fundraising--- these are the things listed on the icommons about this site.
Where is the link to "What is open culture?" "What is this site about?" "Where do i fit into the open source movement?" "How can i contribute?" The about this page makes out that Icommons is about education and getting more money to educate further at a glance (that's fair enough, yet can't it be more?). Where/how does punk culture fit into this? How can people not in step with a corrupt culture get involved? I see open licensing as something punk and cool, i don't see Icommons making any attempt to attract people other those already involved. Is this a problem? I do sense an opportunity for people that are not developers, educators, business people, lawyers and law professors to be involved in open source. Yet how many people came to the last event with just a basic education? Consider those outside the Icommons movement when you revisit the mission please. A nice start would be to change the words lab to art and clynic to creation. Yet what qualification do i have to say these things?
Jamison · Oslo (Norway) · Jan 16th, 2008 8:51 pm
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"Is it part of the iCommons mission to bring the users of the licences together?"
Ummmm, I'll let the iCommons team tackle that one.
"If Science Commons is focused on the intellectuals within the movement, why partly not the same?"
OK, this one's mine. Hi everyone, I'm John Wilbanks, and I am in charge of the Science Commons project.
We're not focused on "the intellectuals in the movement" or even the research discussed in this thread. We're focused on the ways in which the commons - broadly construed as the public domain + contract regimes that facilitate sharing - interacts with technology, scientific policy, and scientific culture. We think that the commons can dramatically accelerate the translation of basic research into meaningful discoveries (like new drugs) while at the same time lowering the barriers to entry for new scientists and scientists from all cultures and economic backgrounds.
This has led us to a set of conclusions. First, the infrastructure that supports free culture doesn't support free science yet. Contracts alone don't meet our needs - we're still at the stage of needing things as basic as the Domain Name System for scientific data. Second, the sociocultural aspects of science are inherently dominated by institutions: science is funded by institutions, hosted by institutions, and published through institutions. Web 2.0 and other systems are slow to penetrate in the absence of institutional involvement.
Thus, SC spends most of its time working on projects with institutional partners. We do indeed host small focused meetings with international CCi affiliates interested in our issues, such as the Paris meeting last September on scientific data licensing, but we don't focus on gaining large chunks of the iSummit programming for science, because frankly there are very few scientists in the "movement" - most of those who use CC licenses in the sciences don't do so because they love, or even understand or know about, CC - they do so because they happen to publish in a journal that uses CC licenses, but they choose those journals for scientific reasons and not licensing reasons.
I could go on and on, but instead, I encourage you to check out my blog for a series of posts on these topics. The commons is the answer in science, but it's much less about a community of individuals right now than it is about community infrastructure creation. If SC is successful we will empower a generation of scientists who will then hopefully come to the iCommons movement as individuals, but right now, it's still building roads and bridges.
My blog at Nature Network
wilbanks · Boston (United States) · Jan 17th, 2008 5:11 am
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