The controversy surrounding Copyright has intensified the last year,
and there is little indication that it will subside. The digital
genie is out of the bottle, and the new economic paradigm
surrounding abundance is replacing that of scarcity. Authors and
artists fear that their livelihood will disappear and take action,
those concerned with civil liberties voice their concerns that
privacy, due process of law and free communication is being
eroded. The sides are deeply entrenched, and basic freedoms
become collateral damage.
Existing distribution system based on permissions are inefficient,
slow to adopt new channels and return little value to the actual
artist. Genero is a system under development that aims to solve
"Copyfight" simply by making free culture more attractive than
permission culture, for all parties involved. This is done by
creating a distribution ecosystem where permission is assumed for
commercial use, under pre-determined non-exclusive terms.
The Genero project has…
There is a strong movement in Europe to promote products that support open standards. Directives and proposals at European and national levels have been developed in this area. There is in particular an increasing recognition of the need for governmental organisations to support and promote standard document formats. This vision can stand in stark contrast with the reality of those document formats which can currently be accepted and produced by those organisations.
In this presentation we address the apparent tension between the current situation and the current Swedish governmental vision, which states that the use of Open Source Software and Open Standards should be supported (Prop. 2004/05:175). We find that a small minority of Swedish organisations can actually respond appropriately when presented with a document in a format that conforms to an open standard, whereas all are willing and able to accept documents in a proprietary format.
In many countries there are industry associations…
Free Knowledge and Free Software goes together. Even the definition of
the two is very similar.
Education and life-long learning is about sharing and generating knowledge.
The libre knowledge vision has been expressed as follows:
"Knowledge for all, freedom to learn, towards collective wisdom
enabling people to empower themselves with knowledge
and to share it for community benefit."
When knowledge is shared electronically, the freedom to use, modify
(localize), enhance, mix, and share is essential for effective knowledge
transfer. Localization is almost always required.
The copyleft model, the free licenses, the free & open standards
and file formats, as well as a few other things are fundamental for free
culture, free knowledge, education, and self-learning in the future.
The question is, how do we get more awareness about free knowledge
and the free education programs in our governments and schools as well
as our homes?
There is no single and efficient strategy. We have to look…
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