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home · nodes · local context, global commons · blog · culture in the commons and a deliberation of opennness - july articles
Culture in the commons and a deliberation of opennness - July articles
The Local Context, Global Commons project was kick-started with the broad themes of culture, the Commons and the notion of openness. Although broad in outlook, the articles themselves offered controversial, alternative viewpoints which have sparked lively debate within the iCommons community. This has been an ideal way to mark the launch of this global south project.
Paula Martini and Prashant Iyengar produced interesting examples of user generated content and the irrelevance of cultural heritage respectively. Read Paula's article Who Owns What? User Generated Content in Brazil that discusses the "I own your own words" model that many recording companies use, purporting to promote audience creativity but instead limiting the rights of the creator. Paula provides less restrictive alternatives to this model, highlighting in particular Gilberto Gil’s Banda Larga Tour as a positive example.
Prashant's article Cultural Heritage and the Commons provides some vignettes that highlight the issue of the invisibility/ irrelevance of Indian cultural heritage due to loss of patronage or the evolution of new techniques and technologies, and also, the misappropriation of cultural artifacts for commercial interests with no compensation to the communities from which these artifacts are retrieved.
Allison Fish demonstrates the fluidity of the commons in her article Source-ing yoga: the implications for the Commons. Allison highlights that the ‘the commons’ is not a static concept. She draws our attention to “the yoga wars” which came about when Bikram Choudhury attempted to enforce copyright and trademarks claims to a specific series of 26 yoga postures.
Eric Kansa's article Finding Common Ground in the Digital Commons discusses how, in trying to preserve traditional culture through digitization, a ‘top down’ manner has been used and how these databases have come under increasing fire for divorcing TK from their communities and cultural contexts.
Paul Jacobson and Rebecca Kahn provide ideas around openness in their articles South African Legal Resources and How Open is Open? Paul discusses different types of resources which are largely inaccessible for the vast majority of South Africans, and discusses the concept of open law initiatives that are slowly gaining on their commercial equivalents. This indicates an important shift to allowing law to promote and protect fundamental rights which shapes the legal, political, social and economic frameworks of South African society.
Rebecca discusses the beginning of an investigation into describing exactly what defines the term ‘open’ in the article: How Open is Open? Rebecca discusses plans to develop a framework for measuring openness, which can be applied to anything; from government systems to archival sectors or individual projects. This could take the form of a checklist, listing most basic, to the most complex criteria.
tags:
culture local-context-global-commons research ip legal-resources openness framework heritage developing world collaboration
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New upgrades to icommons.org
We have some exciting new upgrades to icommons.org to report! The latest updates to the site include:
- The ability to upload vertical pictures along with horizontal pictures to the site. We've also set the minimum picture size from 600 to 420 pixels, and you can upload both jpgs and pngs.
- Additions to our list of embedded videos that can be supported on the site - now video... more
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