Re: nettime The Society of the Unspectacular
On Sunday, 10. June 2007 19:42, Morlock Elloi wrote: If empowerment of the public by cheap self-publishing has demonstrated anything, it is that a vast majority has nothing to say, lacks any detectable talent and mimicks TV in publishing the void of own life (but unlike TV they derive no income from commercials.) If media are made by, and for, one's own community (which might be very small) then talent and excitement are measured very differently. The material on youtube etc is boring, mainly, I guess, because it was not made for you. Most of us produce lots of stuff that is boring to all but a hand full of people. But to them, it's great. It's the stuff that used to be called private, but is now online because it's the easiest way to get to the intended audience of 5 (or 500, or 5000). So I wouldn't say that the classical notion of public has changed in the sense that it got fragmented around new media. It's new media giving content-free personal smalltalk the ability to be globally visible (not that anyone looks at it in practice, but they could, in theory.) The technical possibility that everyone can watch it is pointing into the totally wrong direction. It's doesn't mean that everyone should watch it, it only means that the size of the audience is not determined on the level of the technical protocol but can scale freely up or down. This does, in some from, lead to a fragmentation of the public, not the least because the public in modern democracies was constituted through the narrow bandwidth of mass media. Though I'm not sure if this is the reason, as Eric suspects, for the very manifest trend of governments withdrawing from public discourse. Yet, for whatever reason, there seems to be a inverse relationship between the degree of privacy of ordinary people and the secrecy of governments. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime sad news
This is very sad news, indeed. As Trebor Scholz wrote Ricardo Rosas saw and established connections where few people could perceive them, let alone could make them work. Yet, once he pointed them out and set out to bring them into the world, they were natural. He introduced a lot of people, including myself, to Brazil and to a world of ideas, cosmoplitan and uniquely personal at the same time. He did so in the most humane way possible, by having long conversations, zig-zaging through Sao Paolo, disappearing and turing up again with more people, more connections, more things to do. I was always convinced our paths would cross again, there would be plenty of time for more drinks, walks, and conversations. It would have been the most natural thing in the world. Now it won't be. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime shocklogs wikipedia entry
On Wednesday, 7. February 2007 16:33, Geert Lovink wrote: What is kind of amazing is the Anglo-Saxon language policing, which term is and is not 'proper' English. An (English) wikipedia entry cannot be valid if it based on 'foreign language' sources now about that? Wikipedia is not a dictionary and in fact there are many Englishes so it makes you wonder why in particular 'neologisms' are targetted. and not names of (famous) persons, as Pit Schulz mentioned. I think the case against neologism is pretty strong in an encyclopedia which aims to document the state of established factual knowledge, rather than advance it. The case against using exclusively non-english sources is pretty strong, too. Wikipedia, as a whole, is a global project, whereas the English Wikipedia is, well, an English-language project. Sure, there are many Englishes these days, but these are, still, Englishes. I don't think anyone at en.wikipedia would object to a source, or even an article, written in Indian English, or Jamaican English, or in an global ESL English. For the sake of transparency en.wikipedia relies on English-language sources. I mean, I don't read Dutch, so there is no way for me to check if these sources are relevant. I would not call this 'language policing'. I'm pretty sure there is a Dutch-language version of Wikipedia (I never checked and I'm offline right now) where using Dutch-only sources is perfectly valid (I guess). Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Machine Writing / Machine Reading
[This his how my script-based reading system (SpamAssassin) interprets
Alan's script-based writing. The point is not that it (miss)qualifies as
spam, but the interpretative rules that come into effect. Felix]
- Forwarded message from Alan Sondheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] -
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.7 (2006-10-05) on
chavez.mayfirst.org X-Spam-Level: ***
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=3.9 required=3.5 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,
DATE_IN_PAST_24_48,DRUGS_PAIN,LONGWORDS,UNIQUE_WORDS autolearn=no
version=3.1.7
X-Spam-Report:
* 0.9 DATE_IN_PAST_24_48 Date: is 24 to 48 hours before Received: date
* 2.3 UNIQUE_WORDS BODY: Message body has many words used only once
* 0.0 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%
* [score: 0.5000]
* 0.0 DRUGS_PAIN Refers to a pain relief drug
* 3.8 LONGWORDS Long string of long words
* -3.1 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list
X-Virus-Scanned: Debian amavisd-new at chavez.mayfirst.org
From: Alan Sondheim [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: *SPAM* nettime my life collapsed
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Reply-To: Alan Sondheim [EMAIL PROTECTED]
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-20030616-p10 (Debian) at openflows.org
X-Spam-Prev-Subject: nettime my life collapsed
this was culled/scraped from http://www.asondheim.org/biog.txt
i have been working on an autobiography stemming from a simple perl
program
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
# biography
$| = 1;
`cp .bio .bio.old`;
print Would you like to add to bio information? If so, type y.\n;
chop($str=STDIN);
if ($str eq y) {print Begin with date.\n;
print Write single line, use ^d to end.\n;
open(APPEND, .bio);
@text=STDIN;
print APPEND @text;
close APPEND;}
`sort -o .bio .bio`;
exit(0);
that gave me the opportunity for sorting and organizing memories; the
program was then abandoned as the entries were flushed out; the prog-
ram was then re-employed for new memories, and so forth. the result is
unique among autobiogs, as is the entangled compression below:
...
# distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission
# nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Iraq: The Way Forward
On Friday, 5. January 2007 20:36, Michael H Goldhaber wrote: We have reached a crucial turning point in American history. The November elections and current polls have made clear that Americans have soured on the Iraq war, and want the troops to be withdrawn rapidly. I'm not a close observer of American politics (how come that Lieberman was relected?), but what strikes me as the really remarkable outcome of this election is that it revealed the total bankrupcy of the ideologies that has been dominant since the end of the cold war: neo-liberalism (with its emphasis on freedom) and neo-conservativism (with its emphasis on security), which have produced not freedom and security but abandonnment and fear. Neoliberalism has had to declare bankrupcy a while ago, but 9/11 provided the opportunity to swiftly replace it with its darker cousin, so the void was less obvious. Now, we are in a situation where nobody has any good idea what to do. Bringing the troops home now is as unrealistic as fighting for victory. What comes next? Nobody seems to know beyond short-term political tactical games. But while such desorientation might provide room for creative thinking, I'm not optimistic. The social conditions which have provided the mass basis for the acceptance of faith-based politics are still here. Just that the war in Iraq is too manifestly disasterous to whish away. Salon Magazine recently featured an interesting interview with Chris Hedges, NYT reporter (Bosnia, Middle East), and author of a new book on the US Christian right, American Fascists, that seems directly relevant here. http://salon.com/books/feature/2007/01/08/fascism/ Since the midterm election, many have suggested that the Christian right has peaked, and the movement has in fact suffered quite a few severe blows since both of our books came out It's suffered severe blows in the past too. It depends on how you view the engine of the movement. For me, the engine of the movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. You can't deform your society to that extent, and you can't shunt people aside and rip away any kind of safety net, any kind of program that gives them hope, and not expect political consequences. Democracies function because the vast majority live relatively stable lives with a degree of hope, and, if not economic prosperity, at least enough of an income to free them from severe want or instability. Whatever the Democrats say now about the war, they're not addressing the fundamental issues that have given rise to this movement. But isn't there a change in the Democratic Party, now that it's talking about class issues and economic issues more so than in the past? Yes, but how far are they willing to go? The corporations that fund the Republican Party fund them. I don't hear anybody talking about repealing the bankruptcy bill, just like I don't hear them talking about torture. The Democrats recognize the problem, but I don't see anyone offering any kind of solutions that will begin to re-enfranchise people into American society. The fact that they can't get even get healthcare through is pretty depressing. The argument you're now making sounds in some ways like Tom Frank's, which is basically that support for the religious right represents a kind of misdirected class warfare. But your book struck me differently -- it seemed to be much more about what this movement offers people psychologically. Yeah, the economic is part of it, but you have large sections of the middle class that are bulwarks within this movement, so obviously the economic part isn't enough. The reason the catastrophic loss of manufacturing jobs is important is not so much the economic deprivation but the social consequences of that deprivation. The breakdown of community is really at the core here. When people lose job stability, when they work for $16 an hour and don't have health insurance, and nobody funds their public schools and nobody fixes their infrastructure, that has direct consequences into how the life of their community is led. I know firsthand because my family comes from a working-class town in Maine that has suffered exactly this kind of deterioration. You pick up the local paper and the weekly police blotter is just DWIs and domestic violence. We've shattered these lives, and it isn't always economic. That's where I guess I would differ with Frank. It's really the destruction of the
Re: nettime Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
I'm not sure I understand the main thrust of the argument. On the one hand, GPL-type copyleft is criticized for not preventing the appropriation (or, more precisely, use) of code by commercial, capitalist interests. These still manage to move profits from labor (employees / contractors who are paid less than the value their labor produces) into the hands of the capital (shareholders, I guess). On the other hand, Creative Commons, which precisely enables the author to prevent this through the non-commercial clause is criticized for perpetuating the proprietary logic embodied in the author function controlling the use of the work. Which seems to leave as the conclusion that within capitalism the structure of copyright, or IP more generally, doesn't really matter, because it either supports directly fundamentally-flawed notions of property (à la CC), or it does not prevent the common resource to be used in support of capitalist ends (à la GPL). In this view, copyfights appear to articulate a secondary contradiction within capitalism, which cannot solved as long as the main contradition, that between labor and capital, is not redressed. Is that it? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Sweden could scrap file-sharing ban
[It would be ironic if the raid on piratebay.org turned out to be the trigger to create an 'alternative compensation system' (levy on broadband to compensate right holders in order to legalize p2p file sharing). The guys from piratebay have been among the most vocal (and astute) critics of such an idea. [1], [2]. [1] http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0407/msg00020.html [2] http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0407/msg00032.html Felix] http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=4024date=20060609 The Local: Sweden's news in English Sweden could scrap file-sharing ban Published: 9th June 2006 10:36 CET Sweden could introduce a charge on all broadband subscriptions to compensate music and film companies for the downloading of their work, while legalizing the downloading of copyright-protected material, justice minister Thomas Bodstrom has said. Bodstrom told Sydsvenskan that he could consider tearing up legislation passed last year that made it illegal to download copyrighted material. He said that a broadband charge was discussed by Swedish political parties last year, but the Moderates and Left Party rejected it. If they have changed their minds, he is willing to discuss any new proposals they might have, he said. The Left Party said yesterday that they wanted to scrap the current law because it had not reduced illegal file sharing. The Moderate Party has said that the whole area of copyright law should be overhauled to make it clearer, more effective and adapted to technological developments. The most important thing for me is that authors and artists get paid and I will never retreat from that, he told the paper. I have not changed my position, I still think that [the current law] is the best option for two reasons: first, it would be unfair on those who have subscribed to broadband and don't want to download, secondly because it would mean that the government was setting the price for goods, which I don't think we should do, whether those goods are in a shop or on the net, he told TT. But if the Moderates and Left Party have made a 180 degree turn and changed their minds completely, of course they can come and tell us about it. But we had this discussion last year. If they now want to find a completely new solution and have new proposals or ideas we will naturally discuss them. But he emphasized that he favoured the current rules, which he said has created a market, which would not have happened if we hadn't had this law. It is now possible to buy a song for ten kronor, and that is thanks to the new law. Bodstrom said he had not been approached directly by the Left Party or Moderates, and had only read about their proposals in the media. TT/The Local http://felix.openflows.org-- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 - End forwarded message - # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime nettime as practice
On Sunday, 11. June 2006 02:21, John Hopkins wrote: In this Light, I would challenge Felix and Ted (and any others feeling qualified) to write a brief task description of the (different) roles/positions necessary to run nettime as it is today. Put it out here. I certainly have some interest, but would need to know the scalability and absolute size of what tasks are necessary, and how they are (technically and socially) accomplished... There is not much of a challenge here. All that you really need is some long-term dedication to contributing to the nettime project on a very regular basis. It helps to like it, be somewhat familiar with it, and feel comfortable with its style. Technically, in order to start moderating you need to be able to deal with email on a *nix Shell (via ssh). There is no web-interface. It's good to know the mail program 'mutt' (because we have some custom setting that save serious time), but if you don't, it's something that can be learned like other semi-technical stuff and we can help, and, indeed, will help. In the medium term, you should familiarize yourself with 'procmail' and 'spam assassin', otherwise lots of time is spent going through spam and/or finding false positives. This is a real hassle. In the long term, you might need to look for a new host for the mailing list (which has up to 50'000 outgoing mails a day), and for a new admin for the web server. Right now, all of this is provided by other people on a goodwill basis. As goodwill is usually personal, rather than institutional, we have no idea how that transfers. Also, did I mention?, you need high tolerance for personal abuse, by people who don't know you, and, what can be more annoying, by people who know you. It seems unavoidable because of the architecture of mailing lists, and some people really make a big deal out of it. Now, this might sound like endless, thankless drudgery, but it's not, or not only. Being deeply involved in nettime is a good reason, and a motivator, to pay close attention to the discussions and the people, which is very worthwhile. You learn a lot, and a lot of people learn about you. Though the abuse part sucks, no matter what. Felix http://felix.openflows.org-- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
RE: nettime nettime as idea
Hi everyone, sorry for my previous post, it went out without being finished. What I wanted to say was that many of the themes that critical net.culture talked about 10 years ago are now mainstream. They are now playing themselves out on a scale far beyond 'net.culture', indeed, they have become culture, without any pre-fix. If that amounts to winning or losing is besides the point. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of the 1968 movements which also transformed daily life (at least in the West), but as the world around them shifted, with consequences very different from what they intended. Again, if they lost or won, is does not really matter. The world is a different place now. For most of the actors of the early net.culture, this meant either late professionalizing or early retirement. Nettime as a project did not so much professionalize as specialize. It exchanged scope for focus which has moved it a bit closer to academic culture, which is also characterized by that trade-off. But anyone who really knows academia, and the texts it produces (which I personally appreciate), will also recognize how far nettime still is from that. Its scope broader, its style sharper. Caroline Nevejan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Critiqing others for having done 'stuff', aging and moving on in life, I find rather uninteresting. I get interested when I hear what you like to do yourself. I agree, on many levels, nettime works quite well, so there is not an urgent need to change something. But, this does not mean it cannot be improved. Sure it can. But to do that, we need concrete ideas, what would you, personally, individually, like to see in nettime, and how do you put up the resources to do it? The easiest thing is to do it yourself. Silvan Zurbueck did that when he wanted an rss feed for nettime, he took the feed, pumped into a blog, and now there is an rss feed. [1] Tobias van Veen did that when he wanted to hold a nettime meeting in NA, and now we had it. Great. They had an idea, they figured out a way of doing it (by doing it themselves and roping in others to contribute). This is how things work, not by telling others what they should or should not do. The same goes for the various nettime lists in other languages. People came up with the idea of doing something, and they are doing it. Most of the people on this list are not aware of that, because these lists are in languages few of us speak. [1] http://nettime.freeflux.net, http://nettime-ann.freeflux.net/ Andreas Broeckmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]: finally, if you are unhappy with the list, be aware that 'the list', i.e. nettime, is what gets posted. of course, moderation plays a role in this. but the greater role is played by the things that get written and sent, or not. if certain discussions are not happening, it is because people are not writing their opinions. Again, I agree. Moderation is a non-issue, a red-herring. Even if the technical set-up of an email list (conceived at a time when ICT had much less social intelligence built in that it as at times today) lends itself to believing the otherwise. And it's not that Ted and I are turning away the masses who want to do his kind of work. In fact, nobody ever volunteers. N0b0dy, that's with two zeros. We occasionally ask people who are contributing interesting material to the list if they want to moderate, and the answer has always been 'Thank you for asking, but I really do not have the time.' There is one exception. Nettime-ann. Here, four people -- Mason Dixon, Tulpje Tulp, Tsila Hassine, and Hannah Davenport -- responded to an open call what to do with the announcements, and are now running this as their own project, connected to the main list by name and lose but friendly cooperation. They are doing a great, if unglamorous, job. Over the years, we experimented with various set-ups, most importantly dividing the list into two feeds, the standard moderated one and an non-moderated one, called nettime-bold. The interested in the second channel was small from the beginning, and waned entirely shortly after. The levels of spam and self-promotion seem to be tiring for everyone but the self-promoters. After we had to start manually removing posts from the nettime-bold archive, because people entirely unrelated to the list were accused -- with their names and telephone numbers -- of being pedophiles and sent us harrowing stories how this ruined their lives, because googling their names brought up these posts (google loves nettime and ranks its posts often very high up) we decided that this was not the resource we wanted to provide. When we shut-down the list, nobody seemed to notice. So, if anyone feels like moderating -- near daily work, over a long period of time -- and knows how to use an email program on a unix shell (perferably mutt),
nettime Coalition of Canadian Art Professionals Releases Open Letter on Copyright
[The voices of artists against the expansion of copyrights are getting stronger. Stuff like that will make it harder for the industry to claim to represent the interests of creators. Very good. Felix] Media Release: Coalition of Canadian Art Professionals Releases Open Letter on Copyright Tuesday, June 6, 2006 http://www.appropriationart.ca/ Over 500 Art Professionals Call for Balanced Copyright Laws Ottawa, ON -- June 6, 2006 -- Over 500 members of Canada's art community have today released an open letter to the Ministers of Canadian Heritage and Industry calling on the Canadian government to adopt balanced copyright laws that respect the reality of contemporary art practice. Appropriation Art, A Coalition of Art Professionals, comprises artists, curators, arts organizations and art institutions who share a deep concern over Canada's copyright policies and the impact these policies have on the creation and dissemination of contemporary art. The Coalition argues that Canada's current copyright laws put at particular risk those artworks using appropriation, such as conceptual art, art video film, sound art and collage. The Coalition offers three principles that it argues must ground Canada's copyright policy: FAIR ACCESS TO COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL LIES AT THE HEART OF COPYRIGHT. Creators need access to the works of others to create. Legislative changes premised on the need to give copyright owners more control over their works must be rejected. ARTISTS AND OTHER CREATORS REQUIRE CERTAINTY OF ACCESS. The time has come for the Canadian government to consider replacing fair dealing with a broader defense, such as fair use, that will offer artists the certainty they require to create. ANTI-CIRCUMVENTION LAWS SHOULD NOT OUTLAW CREATIVE ACCESS. Laws that privilege technical measures that protect access to digital works must be rejected. The law should not outlaw otherwise legal dealings with copyrighted works merely because a digital lock has been used. Artists work with a contemporary palette, using new technology. They work from within popular culture, using material from movies and popular music. Contemporary culture should not be immune to critical commentary. Artworks that use appropriation have a long and well documented place in the history of art notes Sarah Joyce, a signatory to the Open Letter. These works are collected and exhibited in major cultural institutions across Canada and throughout the world and yet artists express this form of creativity under threat of the law. To silence this valid form of creativity is tragic. That Canada's laws do so is simply wrong. Canada's art community has not been consulted on the implications of possible copyright reforms, states Gordon Duggan, another of the Open Letter's signatories. We are creators, and we rely on copyright laws for our livelihood. Yet, to my knowledge, the needs of Canadian artists have never been a consideration in copyright policy debates. It is time that changed. The sheer size and makeup of this coalition relects the level of dissatisfaction within the art community. These changes are set to lock Canadian art into a very narrow idea of what the Government wants art to be rather than reflecting the reality of contemporary Canadian art. The open letter has been posted at the Coalition's website at www.appropriationart.ca. About The Coalition of Art Professionals: The signatories to the Open Letter span the full range of Canada's art community, and include artists, galleries, art institutions, and curators. A full list of the over 500 individuals and organizations lending their name to the Open Letter may be found at www.appropriationart.ca. For further information, contact: Sarah Joyce or Gordon Duggan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://felix.openflows.org-- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 - End forwarded message - # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Organised Networks: Transdisciplinarity and New Institutional Forms
Perhaps I'm missing here something obvious, but I always thought that networks are a basic type of organization (as are hierachies, markets, and communes, in fact, standard theory assumes that there are only these four basic forms). So, to speak of an organized network, makes no sense to me. All networks are organized, by definition. The social-technical dynamics of ICT-based networks constitute organisation in ways substantively different from networked organisations (unions, state, firms, universities). Again, this makes no sense to me. All large-scale contemporary networks are ICT-based. In fact, ICT is what allows them to scale and hence have a chance to successfully compete with vertically integrated hierachies (the only organizational form, up to very recently, that scaled well). Also, I always thought that unions, the state and its bureaucracies, universities, and old-school firms were prime examples of hierachical organizations. If they are not, what is? And it what sense is a union a networked organization? I'm getting a head-ache, and this is only the first sentence. Felix http://felix.openflows.org-- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime let's go negative and join snubster
Negativity is has its charms, but the fate of being positive and community-minded is inescapable on the Internet. In order to do anything collaboratively, that is, anything at all beyond pure consumption, the 'community' has to minimize internal dissent and make people feel good about contributing. This does not mean squashing internal critique totally, otherwise things get boring, but stabilize it on a level where it is productive, and thus, dare I say, turns positive. After all, if really you don't like it, why don't you just go somewhere else? Anyone who administered an online collaborative project has uttered this sentence more than once. So, we have special interest communities, dog-lovers, negativity-lovers and so on. Endless solipsistic niches of like-minded people. Snubster just has a cool branding. The days of critique and negativity are over. Rather, we have interesting discussions on minor points, enabled by the fact that we basically agree with one another. There are too many options to waste your time really disagreeing with people. Felix # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime TRIPS was a mistake
[It's amazing to see that the treaty which many identify as the corner stone of information feudalism (Peter Drahos) is judged as a failure by one of it's main designers. From Ian Brown's blog, via the always excellent EDRI newsletter [2]. Felix] Lehman: TRIPS was a mistake http://dooom.blogspot.com/2006/03/lehman-trips-was-mistake.html I'm attending a great meeting in Brussels on The Politics and Ideology of Intellectual Property [1]. We just had quite a newsflash from Bruce Lehman, President Clinton's head of intellectual property policy who was largely responsible for the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Lehman now believes TRIPS has been a failure for the United States, because the WTO agreement in which it is included opened US markets to overseas manufactured goods and destroyed the US manufacturing industry. He feels that the US has kept its part of the TRIPS bargain, but that with 90% piracy in China, higher-end developing nations have not. In retrospect, he feels the US should instead have introduced labour and environmental standards into the WTO agreement so that jobs would not be lost in the US manufacturing sector to countries with few environmental standards and weak unions. How exhilirating that Mr Lehman agrees with civil society IP experts across the developed and developing world! [1] http://www.tacd.org/docs/?id=286 [2] http://www.edri.org/ http://felix.openflows.org-- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Open Source Projects as Voluntary Hierarchies
Open Source Projects as Voluntary Hierarchies Weber, Steven (2004) The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP ISBN: 0-674-01292-5, pp. 311 Over the last half-decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has moved from the hacker margins to the mainstream. Corporations, large and small, have invested in it, some governments are actively supporting it and it is becoming an increasingly important tool for the building of an international civil society. In the social sciences, the field is receiving a growing share of attention, evidenced by a widening stream of research output. The central repository for relevant papers, opensource.mit.edu, lists some 250 researchers with a self-declared interest in all things FOSS and almost as many scholarly papers, contributed in just five years. Additionally, there are several volumes written by activists, book-length treatments by journalists, plus biographies of the two most prominent figures, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. To this burgeoning literature, the most ambitious contribution is Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source. Weber, a political scientist from University of California, Berkeley, focuses on a political economy approach which he understands as 'a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms' (p.1). His main interest lies in the social formations built around FOSS's particular mode of production. What differentiates this mode from other systems of immaterial production is its approach to property. Whereas the conventional notions of property are based on unambiguous ownership and the associated right of excluding others, in the context of FOSS, property is organized around the right to distribute. Its key concerns are not how to ascribe ownership and manage exclusion, but to develop the best strategies to maximize access and collaboration. This is a profound change, and Weber puts it rightly at the beginning of his analysis. In this perspective FOSS is a public good, a resource that, once produced, everyone can use, akin to a street light. Standard political theory assumes there are no incentives for private entities to produce public goods, because the non-excludability invites free-riding, impeding markets built on scarcity. Thus, the provision of such goods is usually in the hands of governments who invest in them for the benefit of society as a whole. FOSS is a counter-intuitive example where a large number of entities, individuals as well as organizations, produce highly complex products as public goods with no, or very little, involvement of the state. Early analysts recognized that, given mainstream theoretical assumptions, FOSS is an 'impossible public good' (p.1). Clearly, however, it is not a fluke. Many of the core projects - such as the Linux kernel, the Apache webserver, the GNU software - are by now more than a decade old and are still growing, so it is no longer in doubt as to whether FOSS represents a 'system of sustainable value creation'. But what kind of system? The two core chapters of the book (which also contains a thorough history of FOSS and somewhat less thorough sections on business and law) focus on the 'microfoundations', the individual motivations to contribute to FOSS projects, and on the 'macro-organizations' involved. Weber aims to show that contributors are not altruistic, but guided by range of incentives, from seeking aesthetic pleasures to reputation and identity building. The question of incentives is probably the best researched of all aspects of the conundrum that FOSS poses to conventional political and economic theory and Weber does a very good job of systematizing and summarizing the state of the discussion, even if he adds little new. More interesting and original is the chapter on the macro-organization of FOSS projects. Here, Weber shows that these projects are not chaotic at all, but tend to have explicit formal structures (release schedules, project leaders, official repositories, etc) and that notions of self-organization do not really clarify much. To bring together the two basic observations that all contributions are voluntary, and that projects are hierarchically structured, Weber develops the notion of a voluntary hierarchy (though, he never quite calls it that). In such a governance system, individuals voluntarily accept their position in a hierarchy, because they realize that doing so is beneficial to them. Their own contributions get recognized and the overall project develops into a direction that they like. In such as system, contrary to what we usually think of hierarchies, power flows from the bottom to the top 'because the leader depends on the followers more than the other way around[']Asymmetrical interdependencies favor the potential followers, who will make a free and voluntary choice where to invest their work' (p.160). The freedom of choice if and where to contribute is not
nettime Netbase (1995-2006)
Yesterday, there was a party in Vienna. It was a small, at times sombre, at times exuberant affair, fitting for the occasion. The final call for netbase, the institute for cultural technologies. Today, the doors remained closed and the website turned static. After more than a decade sailing hard against the currents, suffering countless near-death experiences, it's hard to believe that the fall of the curtain is now final. No more publicity stunts. With the netbase, one of the last 'free radicals' of the early internet culture disappears, an institution which understood art as necessarily critical, both of the commercial hype and the old and new centers of power. Insisting on the freedom of art, defining its value as cultural intelligence, probing alternative futures, netbase refused play along with the neo-liberal redefinition of culture into 'services' to be measured by tourism boards, economic development agencies, or ministries of education. Rather, what characterized netbase was an insistence on acting in public, engaging the public directly and on its own terms. That such an approach is ultimately doomed, particularly in a country like Austria, is hardly a surprise. Like a crash in a formula one race, it's easy to say i saw it coming. Even if the real surprise is probably that netbase lasted that long, witnessing its closure is a sad affair nevertheless. Particularly for many nettimers, who enjoyed, at one time or another, its particular kind of hospitality in here Vienna. Felix +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime The crisis of democracy and referenda
On 11/01/06, Prem Chandavarkar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A referendum helps to resolve impasses reached when you have polarised opinions on critical single cause issues. It cannot be a substitute for the day to day negotiations of representative politics. True. On the other hand, elected representatives may well be less likely to pass unpopular laws, and more likely to take the views of the majority into account when carrying on those day-to-day negotiations, if they know that citizens can easily arrange a referendum on any issue in order to reverse their decisions. The existence of an easy referendum mechanism, even if it is rarely used, may thus make politicians more sensitive to public opinion. In Switzerland, the place that has the most extensive experience with referenda, this is exactly what happens. Politically speaking, the most important thing about a referendum is not calling one, but to be able to credibly claim that one can does so. This buys you the ticket to the negotiation table. Before any law passes, there are extensive rounds of negotiations (called Vernehmlassung in Swiss-German), where all the groups that can call a referendum are asked to provide feedback to the proposed law, making sure that all the powerful groups in the country agree on a law, or can at least live with it. Nobody wants to work for years on a law, and then have it subjected to to vagueries of a public vote (which is always unpredictable, since one never knows about the context in which the vote is actually held). In practice, this slows down everything, and give a lot of influence to unelected presentative of powerful groups, why may, depending on the issue, include unions and environmental groups. As an effect, the power of elected politicians is serverely curtailed, after all, the representative aspects are only one part of this particular Swiss brand of democracy. Because the mechanisms of Swiss democracy are rather different from others, the crisis that it faces is also very different. Yes, of course, there's also a lot of lobbying, but given the curtailed power of politicians, buying them off only gets you so far. The actual crisis is two fold: first, given the need to consult and include ever diverging interest, the system slows down to a crawl, as, in the end, it's always safer to do nothing than to risk losing face in a refendum. Second, more and more stuff gets decided on an international basis, with the national parliaments only responsible for converting international treaties (or EU directives) into national law. Yet, the fiction that direct democracy is the ultimate source of power, needs to be maintained, as it's so crucial to Swiss identity. So how do you square this? By inventing a construction called autonomer Nachvollzug which can be translated as autonomous conformation. If that sounds like a paradox, it is. The key idea is that Switzerland is autonomous to conform to international agreements. In fact, of course, it is not, but given its deep interlikages with the EU and other countries, it simply has to take over what is decided there. +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Benjamin Mako Hill on Creative Commons
The CC licenses, however, try to provide some protections for the producers of content by providing non-commercial clauses. Which is a bogus advantage. We had this discussion in Nettime before, and the common sense was that the concept of commerce implied in those clauses is neither defined nor clear at all. If our exchange would be printed in a Nettime book, and the book was for sale even if it made no profit or even losses for the publishers, it would be still a commercial distribution and hence not allow the inclusion of material licensed with this clause. This would even be the case if it were published on a CD-ROM sold for 50 cents, or in exchange for a blank CD medium. The non-commercial clause is, indeed, deeply problematic. It is virtually impossible to define what commercial means. It is not a legal concept to my knowledge. Is everything that is sold a commercial transaction. Or only things that are sold with the intention of profit? Then again, how would one define intention? Or is it the success that makes a venture commercial? Assuming the nettime reader, as it was printed and distributed, did not constitute a commercial venture. But what if it had been a runaway success, with four reprints? That would have made it profitable, for sure. Where would one draw the line? After the first re-print? or the second? In the end, the non-commercial clause restricts the creative commons to consumption, hobbyism, and, how convenient for its academic sponsors, to teaching. While I see the point of, say, musicians not wanting to have their works misused in advertisement, the share-alike clause of the GPL would already have prevented this from ever happening. There is no way in hell that any brand would allow its ads to be released under the GPL. You cannot put a trademark under the GPL. The only example I can think of that the GPL would not protect a musician against crass, unwanted commercial exploitation is if a GPLed song was included in a commercial compilation of songs. This would not affect the closed license of the other songs, or the compilation as a whole (similar to including free software on a cd with other programs). In the end, while I do not agree with Florian that the differences between works that are necessarily collaborative and temporary (say, software) than those that can be indivually produced and finished (say, a novel) are negligible, on the level of the license the share-alike aspect works well for both as a protection against commercial rip-offs without producing the problems of a non-commercial clause. Felix +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime A pragmatic respone to a Critique of the Commons without Commonalty
Forwarded with the permission of the author. Felix -- Forwarded Message -- Subject: [ipr] A pragmatic respone to a Critique of the Commons without Commonalty Date: Thursday, 7. July 2005 19:58 From: Andrew Rens [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: iprpublicdomain [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... The article certainly provides a stimulating theoretical critique of Creative Commons. There are a number of places where the critique elides the complex nature of issues most notably the characterisation of Res Communes, and the analysis of precisely what copyright constitutes as private and public. I am however not going to address the theoretical critique of Creative Commons at this point. There are a few matters of pragmatic import, which the analysis seeks to occlude. I address these as matters of strategy as someone who has experienced political struggle, and also has used law to effect rhizomatic change. No-one at Creative Commons, certainly not Professor Lessig is suggesting that Creative Commons is the only or even primary model for creativity, nor that it represents the ideal state of copyright. Rather it is one working model amoung many. For those who believe that Intellectual Property can be balanced; a healthy creative ecosystem will include a multitude of different models. For those who don't believe in Intellectual Property at all Creative Commons is a practical strategy of working towards an open culture given real world conditions. It has already opened up space for voices that would not otherwise have been heard. The energy and excitement surrounding Creative Commons stem in part because many people are for the first time to see what open culture looks like, and so imagine what it could be in the future. As such it is a greater stimulant to libre culture than academic critiques of late capitalist cultural production. It is also a project which people and organisations of all theoretical stripes and ideological flavours can co-operate in, which is why both Jack Valenti and John Perry Barlow spoke at the opening. One of the greatest strengths of Creative Commons is this aspect of an open project; people who may differ on many other issues can all contribute to the common good. A common project such as this can easily be stigmatized as co-option, but only by the same logic that human rights lawyers, using what law there is within a repressive state to secure the freedom or safety of prisoners, can be regarded as co-opted. Participation in Creative Commons is not an exhaustive index of who a person is. A person can support Creative Commons and be committed to the long term abolition of all Intellectual Property or work full time for a corporate law firm or any of the whole range of options in between. The analysis rejects copyright law as an organising strategy for creativity, yet does not develop an alternative vision of a commons, specifying only what it is not, it is thus difficult to imagine this theoretical commons at all. Andrew Rens Legal Lead Creative Commons South Africa +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Using copyright to stop the publication of 'mein kampf'
Here's an interesting use of copyright for all of those who track its (ab)use for political reasons. In Poland, publisher Marek Skierkowski is being investigated on behalf of the state of Bavaria for infringing on its copyright on the works of Adolf Hitler. The case is the following: The publisher, who has no history of neo-Nazi sympathizing, decided to publish Mein Kampf purely for commercial reasons. Now, Poland -- like many other countries in Europe -- has a law criminalizing distribution of fascist propaganda (?246 of Polish criminal code). However, the publisher could convince the state attorney that Mein Kampf does not constitute current political propaganda, but has to be viewed as a historic document and that making it accessible would serve historic and scientific purposes, not the least because he is clearly not politically motivated. Since he does not try to convince anyone of any political views, his publication do not constitute propaganda, so the reasoning of the attorney. What does this have to do with copyright and Bavaria? After WWII, the state of Bavaria was given by the allies all the copy- and author's rights belonging to Hitler, because he was officially registered as a Munich resident by the end of the war. And now, Bavaria tries to use its copyrights to stop the publication in Poland after the application of national criminal law failed to do so. Bavaria holds the copyrights for another ten years (70 years after the death of the author) after which it falls into the public domain. Source: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361691,00.html +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Ghost in the Network
On Monday, 16. May 2005 12:56, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker wrote: We suggest that this opposition between closed and open is flawed. It unwittingly perpetuates one of today's most insidious political myths, that the state and capital are the two sole instigators of control. Instead of the open/closed opposition we suggest the pairing physical/social. The so-called open logics of control, those associated with (non proprietary) computer code or with the Internet protocols, operate primarily using a physical model of control. For example, protocols interact with each other by physically altering and amending lower protocological objects (IP prefixes its header onto a TCP data object, which prefixes its header onto an HTTP object, and so on). But on the other hand, the so-called closed logics of state and commercial control operate primarily using a social model of control. For, example, Microsoft's commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of market exchange. Or, using another example, Digital Rights Management licenses establish a social relationship between producers and consumers, a social relationship backed up by specific legal realities (DMCA). Viewed in this way, we find it self evident that physical control (i.e. protocol) is equally powerful if not more so than social control. Thus, we hope to show that if the topic at hand is one of control, then the monikers of open and closed simply further confuse the issue. Instead we would like to speak in terms of alternatives of control whereby the controlling logic of both open and closed systems is brought out into the light of day. I think this equation of protocol = control, which is also the core of Galloway's stimulating book [1], is fundamentally flawed, because it mixes terms in ways that is not helpful to a critical political analysis. A protocol, technical or social, is a series of standards which regulate how different entities can interact without the establishment of a formal hierarchy. Remember, the term originated in the context of exchanges between the king and foreign diplomats. The key about this relationship was that the diplomats were not the king's subjects, yet the diplomats were the equal to the king. They were different. The purpose of a protocol was to allow them to interact without the establishment of a formal hierarchy. To argue that the protocol now, somehow, controlled the king and the diplomats seems strange. The same problem occurs when arguing that the Internet Protocol is somehow the ultimate controlling mechanism of the Internet. The fact that communication takes place within certain constraints, which enable communication in the first place, does not equate control. Rather, constraints on one level (the protocol of communication) can provide the grounds for freedom on an other level (content of communication). This is social theory 101. The whole argument of protocol = control seems to rest on a somewhat unimaginative reading of Foucault's micro physics of power, in which he argued that language itself is a main source of power and that the establishment of categories (e.g. madness) was itself a supreme act of power. To transfer this one-on-one to protocols of communication networks, yields yet another control phantasy (or nightmare, depending on your agenda). The only choice it leaves you is to jump into a some sort of 'pre-social' state. And this is precisely what Galloway Thacker offer us: Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule. Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality. What we have here is the 'social' vs. the 'technical', and the 'unplanned' vs. the 'planned'. Why this should lead to more freedom is dubious. Unless we understand freedom as absence of rules and control as presence of rules. This, however, is a very misleading understanding of these concepts, as has been argued often, not the least by in the feminist critique of the anti-authoritarian social movements of the late 1960s. [2] PS: I am not arguing that protocols cannot be used as mechanism of social control. Rather, this has to be established on a case-by-case basis, rather than pronouncing protocols as means of control per se. [1] Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press [2] Freeman, Jo (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave. Vol. 2 No. 1 http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact:
nettime I.B.M. to Give Free Access to 500 Patents
[As the article points out at the end, 500 patents is a relatively small number for IBM (which holds more than 10.000 software patents). Nevertheless, it represents a significant policy change in how to manage patents by the world's leading holder of patents. Is is also very different from Microsoft's current approach of seeking cross-licensing deals among holders of large patent portfolios. IBM Press Release: http://www.ibm.com/news/us/en/2005/01/patents.html Linux World Story: http://www.linuxworld.com/story/47749_p.htm Felix] NYT January 11, 2005 I.B.M. to Give Free Access to 500 Patents By STEVE LOHR http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/technology/11soft.html I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code. The new model for I.B.M., analysts say, represents a shift away from the traditional corporate approach to protecting ownership of ideas through patents, copyrights, trademark and trade-secret laws. The conventional practice is to amass as many patents as possible and then charge anyone who wants access to them. I.B.M. has long been the champion of that formula. The company, analysts estimate, collected $1 billion or more last year from licensing its inventions. The move comes after a lengthy internal review by I.B.M., the world's largest patent holder, of its strategy toward intellectual property. I.B.M. executives said the patent donation today would be the first of several such steps. John Kelly, the senior vice president for technology and intellectual property, called the patent contribution the beginning of a new era in how I.B.M. will manage intellectual property. I.B.M. may be redefining its intellectual property strategy, but it apparently has no intention of slowing the pace of its patent activity. I.B.M. was granted 3,248 patents in 2004, far more than any other company, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patent office is announcing today its yearly ranking of the top 10 private-sector patent recipients. I.B.M. collected 1,300 more patents last year than the second-ranked company, Matsushita Electric Industrial of Japan. The other American companies among the top 10 patent recipients were Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology and Intel. I.B.M. executives say the company's new approach to intellectual property represents more than a rethinking of where the company's self-interest lies. In recent speeches, for example, Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive, has emphasized the need for more open technology standards and collaboration as a way to stimulate economic growth and job creation. On this issue, I.B.M. appears to be siding with a growing number of academics and industry analysts who regard open-source software projects as early evidence of the wide collaboration and innovation made possible by the Internet, providing opportunities for economies, companies and individuals who can exploit the new model. This is exciting, said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. It is I.B.M. making good on its commitment to encourage a different kind of software development and recognizing the burden that patents can impose. I.B.M. has already made substantial contributions to open-source software projects in the last few years. The company has been the leading corporate supporter of Linux. It donated computer code worth more than $40 million to an open-source group, Eclipse, which offers software tools for building programs. Last year, I.B.M. gave to an open-source group a database program called Cloudscape, which cost the company $85 million to develop. Those past contributions, however, have gone mainly to projects that serve to make Linux - fast becoming a viable alternative to the operating systems Windows from Microsoft and Solaris from Sun Microsystems - more attractive to corporate customers. In that respect, supporting Linux helps to undermine I.B.M.'s rivals and can be seen as a smart tactic for I.B.M. The company's commercial software strategy is focused largely on its WebSphere software, which runs on top of operating systems. Today's move by I.B.M. is not aimed at a specific project, but opens access to 14 categories of technology, including those that manage electronic commerce, storage, image processing, data handling and Internet communications. This is much broader than the contributions we've made in the past, said Jim Stallings, vice president for standards and intellectual property at I.B.M. These patents are for technologies that are deeply embedded in many industry uses, and they will be available to anyone working on open-source projects including small companies and individual entrepreneurs. I.B.M. executives said they hoped the company's initial contribution of 500 patents
Re: nettime A 'licensing fee' for GNU/Linux?
OK, let me try to restate my argument somewhat differently as to take into consideration a) the fact that software being proprietary _per se_ does not indemnify the user (Florian's point) and b) that SW patents create a mess for all programmers (Scott's point) and c) that none of us is a patent lawyer hence we don't know when patent infringement creates liability for the author and when for the user (Novica's point). The key point here is b). SW patents make the publishing of software code more difficult because they create uncertainly over IP rights. This uncertainty can be limited, but never completely eliminated, by extensive and expensive patent research. Users, for understandable reasons, don't want to be exposed to this kind of risk, so they will demand, if that is not already a standard clause in contracts, that the provider of software guarantees that he has all the rights to the software licensed. So the party which issues the license of the software will have to assume this risk. Small companies have a hard time to do this because they can neither afford to do the necessary research to be able to assess the risk realistically, nor can they afford to pay possible settlements, in case they get sued successfully. After all, how many companies could pony up more than $520 million as the result of an infringement suit? Large companies can deal with this risk for a variety of reasons. They hold many of the patents themselves; they are in cross-licensing agreements with other companies with large patent pools; they have the lawyers necessary to fight the cases and they have the reserves to pay the occasional fine as a general costs of doing business. Small companies have none of that and, this is the key point, neither have various foundations and authors of FOSS. Consequently, neither small proprietary software companies, nor FOSS communities can issues such guarantees and hence the users of their software will have to assume the risk. For users of FOSS unwilling to accept such risk -- mainly large institutional users -- there are two possibilities. One is to buy their FOSS solution from a major vendor that offers indemnification as part of the service contract (similar to a provider of proprietary software). The other is to purchase insurance (like the one offered by OSRM). Both create costs not entirely dissimilar to a licensing fee. In addition, I would speculate, that such indemnification clauses and insurances will limit the freedom of development in the future and could lead to a concentration in the SW industry, proprietary _and_ FOSS. The difference is that the proprietary SW industry is already highly concentrated, whereas the FOSS industry is usually thought of as more decentralized. In this sense, SW patents will not kill FOSS, but they will give large companies much more leaway in determining its future, substantially hollowing out the 'freedom' in free software. Felix +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A 'licensing fee' for GNU/Linux?
Felix, sorry if I sound rude, but this is not true, and you unintentionally spread FUD here! Proprietary licensing does _not_ protect customers from patent ligitation, unless the license contract explicitly states so. Software patents can be and have been enforced against users/licensees of proprietary software, too. Unisys' enforcement of the LZW/GIF patent, with its legal action against websites that used GIF images in 1999 (see http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/Gif.html) is a prominent example. Well, actually, the story of the GIF patent controversy is exactly the other way around and fits perfectly into my argument about differences between proprietary and FOSS in terms of risk exposure in the coming patent mess. Yes, Unisys did sue some people over their use of .gif files on their webpages. But the details are important here. As Mark Starr, General Patent and Technology Counsel for Unisys at the time, explained it to Slashdot if the GIFs on your Web site were created with software that is licensed by Unisys, you are fine. Nobody at Unisys is going to try to get $5000 or even $0.50 out of you. Period. [1] As he continued to explain, all of the major proprietary packages (Adobe, Corel etc) had licensed the patented technology and hence users where entitled make as many .gif images as they wanted for whatever purpose. What they were after were people who used programs that had not licensed the patents, which were mainly freeware (though sometimes this freeware was distributed as part of commercial software) and FOSS programs (though they played a minor role back then in the field of graphic design). The suspension of Munich Linux project, which was made toalarm the public about future risks for free software through software patenting in the EU, was therefore dangerously dumb shoot-yourself-into-the-foot PR which did nothing but play into the hands of the proprietary software industry. Independent of how you think about the timing and its strategic value, the problem is real and it's not going to go away by not talking about it. It seems pretty clear to me that patents will be a major weapons against FOSS and the more this becomes public knowledge, the better it is for the fight against software patents. Contrary to what Moglen preaches so eloquently, the development of technology is never straight and the FSF does not have it all figured out. Recently, a two year old memo written by someone at HP arguing that patents are the Archilles heel of FOSS has surfaced [2]. He points in particular to section 7 of the GPL [3] which explicitly forbids to distribute GPL'ed software that contains patents that require a license fees. Asked to respond to it, Eben Moglen copped out, saying that the filing of a lawsuit alleging patent infringement would not be enough to activate section 7. What he did not say was that positive court decision would! Now, is this going to be 'shutdown' FOSS? I doubt it, because major companies such as IBM and HP have invested massively into FOSS and Microsoft and others have little interest to alienate them. But it could substantially transform the social dynamics around FOSS. After all, one of the not so unintended consequences of the patent system is that it allows to form cartells without running into anti-trust issues. [1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/08/31/0143246 [2] http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/19/2315200 [3] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime A 'licensing fee' for GNU/Linux?
It seems like the real battle over the future of Free and Open Source Software is being fought in the area of patents, not copyright. Copyright, which protects a particular expression, is very hard to infringe upon involuntarily. Even if two people happen to have the same idea, chances are, they will express it differently. From the point of view of copyright, no harm done. Patents are different, they protect an idea, independent from its expression. If you have an idea that someone else has already patented, though luck. It's not your idea anymore. The history of technology is full of cases where two people came up with the same invention, but one was faster. Famous is the case of Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey. Both filed their patents for the telephone on February 14, 1876. Bell's was the fifth entry of that day, while Gray's was the 39th. Fast forward to today. Patent offices everywhere are drowning in applications and are chronically understaffed. Once a patent has been submitted, it can take more than a year before it is reviewed, but once it has been approved, it becomes valid retroactively. In an area like software development, where product cycles counted in months, rather than years, this introduces irreducible uncertainty. There is no way of knowing what patents are in the pipeline. Combine that with the fact that complex software packages include a potentially large number of ideas that might, or might not, be patentable it becomes evident that it's essentially unknowable if there might be a patent issue hidden somewhere. This applies to all kinds of software, proprietary as well as free/open source. From a user's point of view, there is, however, a crucial differences. With proprietary software, the company from which the software is licensed assumes all responsibility and the user has no worries beyond the licensing fees. So, when last August a court ruled in an exeptional case that Internet Explorer improperly contained patented technology, it was Microsoft that had to pay up $520,600,000.00 [1]. For the users, the verdict had no relevance what so ever. The case was exceptional because usually, large corporations can settle their patent disputes by crosslicensing their patent portfolios. That makes things easy and has the nice effect of keeping others out. The case is different with Free /Open Source Software. In this case, the users are at real risk. The city of Munich realized this and, in early August, postponed their high profile switch to Linux to assess the patent risk. For the moment, they remain committed to the migration project [2]. They were afraid to suddenly receive an injunction and having to stop using their Linux machines. Chances, one might guess, are remote, but even this is unacceptable to a public administration. A few days earlier, a company called 'Open Source Risk Management' [3], which has Bruce Perens as one of its board members, issued a report warning that the Linux Kernel potentially infringes on 283 patents. Of these only 98 are owned by companies currently friendly to Linux, including 60 from IBM, 20 from Hewlett-Packard and 11 from Intel. This warning was not entirely disinterested, since OSRM will soon begin to sell insurances. The prices, as announced so far, are $150,000.00 per year and this protects against settlement costs of up to $ 5,000,000 [4]. In a similar vein, large Linux sellers such as IBM and HP offer indemnity clauses as part of their Linux deals (in the context of the SCO cause). It's not a big leap of imagination to see the explicit costs of an insurance, or the implicit costs of an indemnification clause as part of a service contract, as a kind of 'licensing fee' for Linux. And like other licensing contracts, they could introduce serious restrictions that work perfectly well on top of GPL code. In HP's case, for example, the indemnification only applies to Linux run on HP hardware. In case of OSRM, one must assume that there will be limits to the kinds of modifications one is allowed to do to the software. Perhaps there will be a list of approved modules one may to compile into the kernel under the terms of the insurance. In some way or another, OSRM will have to define what code exactly the insurance covers. While this kind of patent risk is unlikely to hit the end user directly, it might turn into a major issue for institutional users who are vital in helping Linux break out of its current niche. If anything, this problem is going to get worse. At the end of July, Microsoft announced that it plans to file 3000 patents this year. This would be a significant increase over the 2000 patents it filed last year and the 1000 patents filed just a few years ago. No wonder Bill Gates says that this is something that we are pretty excited (about).[5] [1] http://www.ucop.edu/news/archives/2003/aug11art1.htm [2] http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/bb_dir/presse/2004/08/
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshop
Andrew, Rana, I know nothing about this particular outfit other than its email advertisement, so calling it a 'sweatshop' was more an act of parody a la 'spam kr!it!k' rather one of analysis. The subject line 'business' seemed rather bland. Yet, it was also not random, as the message struck me for several reasons. First, paintings are treated like any other commodity whose costs can be lowered by outsourcing production into a low-wage country. So also for art, Southern China becomes the 'low cost manufacturing base.' Second, like many other low-end businesses, this proposition is spewed about randomly as spam. In fact, nettime got it several time (that's why I noticed it). Third, it contains some rather untrustworthy claims such as the painting being done by 'famous artists', though they remain unspecified. Most importantly, though, it introduces an extreme separation -- extreme in the context of Western art, more common in the textile industry -- between ordering and producing. While made-to-order art has never entirely gone out of fashion with the artist becoming an autonomous subject (so the story line) it has been transformed into an intimate process ( as in having your portrait painted). As such, it's based on a supposedly deep relationship between the person doing the ordering and the one doing the execution. Now, this email indicates that two things are happening. The made-to-order relationship is reappearing with all the loss of status that entails for the artists (a 'famous artist' yet anonymous, like the great medieval artists/artisans). Yet, at the same time, this relationship has been broken under the cost-imperative. This allows to enjoy the product which, like a brand, has a status value much higher than its use value, without any regard to the context of its production. While this is not a sufficient cause to assume sweatshop production conditions, it's a necessary step to establish them for the production of high-value objects. Felix On Sunday 01 August 2004 18:03, Andrew Ross wrote: Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with their Western counterparts? ... -- +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Content Flatrate and the Social Democracy of the Digital Commons
This is a pretty good, if partisan, summary of the discussion and it highlights what is one of the most fundamental, and I would agree troubling, differences between the CreativeCommons and the 'flatrate' approach. CC relies on a bottom-up strategy that can start right here and right now. No need to wait for 'them' to do something before 'you' can get going. The flatrate proposal has, in its implementation, strong top-down aspects. You cannot start it small and you cannot start on your own. This is where the EFF's voluntary proposal is fundamentally flawed. In terms of process, this is a problem, and process matters a lot if you don't know where you are headed -- and I think it's pretty save to say that nobodies really knows how things will shape up in this area. It's all trial and error. However, the critique is based three very questionable assumptions. First. In terms of network design, Rasmus, again and again, equates the system architecture with the application that will run on the system. The system has centralized aspects, hence the application and the effect of these applications will be centralizing. Yet, if you look at it, there is no direct relationship between network design and application effects. Take, as an example, the railroad network. It's highly centralized, yet it's social effects were decentralizing. Take electronic networks. Their architecture is decentralized on some levels, centralized on others and the effects are centralizing control and decentralizing execution, at least in the economy[1]. Now what does that have to do with Rasmus argument, one might ask. Rasmus argues that because of the top-down aspects of the proposal, the effect will be as top down. It will only make the mega-corps richer. Well, it doesn't. Take the situation today. What does an artist really need a label for? Distributing CDs and collecting money. And for this, the bigger is the better. Small labels would like to do that, but there are structural reasons that favor economies of scale, not the least, because you need a large apparatus to distribute stuff and collect money. The p2p networks are great at doing the first, but lousy at doing the latter. Hence, the majors lost control only over distribution, not over compensation and as long as this situation persists, they hold some important cards. Now, when it comes to compensation, they do a really poor job, but the key is, they are still better than anyone else. And this is the reason why they still exist and why few musicians are outright fans of p2p. If you can wrestle control over the other half also away from the majors, their lease on life as expired for good. Then we will have a situation where smaller labels will prosper because they can concentrate on doing what they do best -- support talent -- while not being structurally disadvantaged when it comes to compensating talent. In this perspective, an network architecture that has top-down aspects can have a decentralizing effect. Second. Most artist don't make any money today, why should they make any tomorrow. Cultural producers are making their living in a true multitude of ways. The sale of reproductions is just one. People have other jobs part- or full-time, they have subsidies of different kinds, some are students, many get money by performing live and giving lessons. In general, workfare-type political measures on the labor market [22] is a far bigger threat against most artists than any new reproduction technique. Great, working 8 hours at McDonald's so you can produce free culture in your spare time. Or perhaps free culture is only for those lucky enough to have high-paying jobs that give them free time (like high-end programmers?). I personally don't like the situations -- and I'm sure most of us know them -- where everyone gets paid except the artists. How many artists show their stuff without compensation in museums and kunsthallen? How many curators work there for free? How many printers print the fancy catalogues for free? How many janitors do? You get the drift. There is a clear imbalance, and one that gets legitimized with some outmoded mystique about creative work being rewarding in and off itself. OK, artists don't get paid in cash, but, hey, they are showered with symbolic capital! It is not that a 'new reproduction technique' is threatening the artists. What's happening desite deep technological change, the situation is not changing. All that empowering, and, yes, decentralizing potential of new media has stopped just where the money would have started. Hm. Also, demanding that the welfare state cross-subsidizes the production of culture through a generous system of unemployment insurance is not only not particularly realistic, but also a strange in a text that uses 'social democracy' with such pejorative undertones. I find it hard to tell where social democracy ends and the welfare state starts and it
nettime FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART
--- Forwarded message follows --- May 25, 2004 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART Feds Unable to Distinguish Art from Bioterrorism Grieving Artist Denied Access to Deceased Wife's Body DEFENSE FUND ESTABLISHED - HELP URGENTLY NEEDED Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911 early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric of the War on Terror, decided Kurtz's art supplies were actually bioterrorism weapons. Thus began an Orwellian stream of events in which FBI agents abducted Kurtz without charges, sealed off his entire block, and confiscated his computers, manuscripts, art supplies... and even his wife's body. Like the case of Brandon Mayfield, the Muslim lawyer from Portland imprisoned for two weeks on the flimsiest of false evidence, Kurtz's case amply demonstrates the dangers posed by the USA PATRIOT Act coupled with government-nurtured terrorism hysteria. Kurtz's case is ongoing, and, on top of everything else, Kurtz is facing a mountain of legal fees. Donations to his legal defense can be made at http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/ FEAR RUN AMOK Steve Kurtz is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York's University at Buffalo, and a member of the internationally-acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble. Kurtz's wife, Hope Kurtz, died in her sleep of cardiac arrest in the early morning hours of May 11. Police arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art supplies and called the FBI. Within hours, FBI agents had detained Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist and cordoned off the entire block around his house. (Kurtz walked away the next day on the advice of a lawyer, his detention having proved to be illegal.) Over the next few days, dozens of agents in hazmat suits, from a number of law enforcement agencies, sifted through Kurtz's work, analyzing it on-site and impounding computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Health Department condemned his house as a health risk. Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, makes art which addresses the politics of biotechnology. Free Range Grains, CAE's latest project, included a mobile DNA extraction laboratory for testing food products for possible transgenic contamination. It was this equipment which triggered the Kafkaesque chain of events. FBI field and laboratory tests have shown that Kurtz's equipment was not used for any illegal purpose. In fact, it is not even _possible_ to use this equipment for the production or weaponization of dangerous germs. Furthermore, any person in the US may legally obtain and possess such equipment. Today, there is no legal way to stop huge corporations from putting genetically altered material in our food, said Defense Fund spokeswoman Carla Mendes. Yet owning the equipment required to test for the presence of 'Frankenfood' will get you accused of 'terrorism.' You can be illegally detained by shadowy government agents, lose access to your home, work, and belongings, and find that your recently deceased spouse's body has been taken away for 'analysis.' Though Kurtz has finally been able to return to his home and recover his wife's body, the FBI has still not returned any of his equipment, computers or manuscripts, nor given any indication of when they will. The case remains open. HELP URGENTLY NEEDED A small fortune has already been spent on lawyers for Kurtz and other Critical Art Ensemble members. A defense fund has been established at http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/ to help defray the legal costs which will continue to mount so long as the investigation continues. Donations go directly to the legal defense of Kurtz and other Critical Art Ensemble members. Should the funds raised exceed the cost of the legal defense, any remaining money will be used to help other artists in need. To make a donation, please visit http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/ For more information on the Critical Art Ensemble, please visit http://www.critical-art.net/ Articles about the case: http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/news-WKBW-2.html http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/news-WKBW.html On advice of counsel, Steve Kurtz is unable to answer questions regarding his case. Please direct questions or comments to Carla Mendes [EMAIL PROTECTED]. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Transeuropean Picnic
Transeuropean Picnic
Historic events are odd things, mostly disappointing. They feel either like
empty routines of calendarial arbitrariness (200 years French Revolution, the
millennium) or utterly imposed (9/11, war in Iraq). Either way, they usually
render one passive, through boredom or powerlessness. History, it seems, is
always made by others. The EU enlargement, somehow, doesn't really fit this
pattern, eventhough it had plenty of both in it.
Yet, it is also, or perhaps primarily, an unfinished event, one whose actual
meaning goes far beyond the overcoming the divisions of the cold war or any
other of the standard themes trotted out by celebratory speakers on market
squares across the continent. Its meaning, really, will only slowly emerge,
through the accumulation of everyday practice. The EU, after all, famously
lacks a vision.
How could such a practice look like from the point-of-view of open media
cultures? To think about this, kuda.org, together with v2, issued an
invitation to gather in Novi Sad, Serbia for a transeuropean pic-nic on the
weekend of the enlargement [1].
Of course, being in Serbia, one cannot help but be reminded that this great
process of unification is also a process of creating new boundaries, of
establishing new visa regimes, border controls and barriers to mobilities
(which my spell checker insists to render as 'nobilities'). Yet, bringing
together a hundred people from some 20 countries between the Netherland and
Georgia on a shoe-string budget and have them picnic on the porch of Tito's
hunting cabin in the midst of a pristine national park, one felt equally that
new possibilities were opening up, in the cracks of the major narrative.
This, as became more clear to me during the discussions, has to do with the
particular character of this thing, the EU, that is growing before our eyes.
Most importantly, the EU is not a state. It doesn't raise taxes, doesn't have
a military or a police force, doesn't create laws (only directives to be made
into laws at the national level), or issue passports. It doesn't even have a
sports team. Yet, it is also not a meaningless exercise of an out-of-control
bureaucracy issuing 'symbols' and creating well-intentioned but freefloating
'discourses'. Rather, the best way to think of the EU, it seems to me, is as
a gigantic coordination mechanism. It has a relatively small hub
('Brussels'), trying to get others nodes in a network -- some bigger, others
smaller than itself -- to behave in a way that things can flow between them
more easily. The enlargement just added a lot of nodes to this network. The
coordinating hub's main function is to issue pointers that help to direct
these massive material and immaterial flows.
The strange thing about these pointers is their consistency. They are hard and
soft at the same time. By directing flows, they create new pools of
opportunities, while draining others off their resources. For example, many
educational institutions in Europe are going through painfull restructuring
processes at the moment, not just because of funding problems, but because of
attempts to reorient themselves according to EU pointers ('Bologna reform')
hoping to then profit from the new opportunities created by the flows of
people, projects and money being pumped through a somewhat more standardized
European educational landscape. Of course, no institution is forced to do
that -- that's the soft part. However, not doing it will amount to a
self-marginalization virtually nobody is willing to accept -- that's the hard
part.
The EU, then, is a myriad of such circulation systems whose main power rests
on its ability to include or exclude nodes. The main difference between
inside and outside of a network is that opportunities are created exclusively
inside the network (through the circulation of flows of all kinds) whereas
outside, marginality is structurally re-enforced all the time (by being
bypassed).
The important thing is that the EU is not one but a myriad of circulation
systems. Many overlap and reinforce one another -- the enlargement is also a
process of accelerating such consolidation -- but the degree of overlap is
much smaller than in a traditional nation state (say, the US). And this, it
seems to me, is where independent cultural practices come in. They can
contribute that this consolidation of the patterns of inclusion / exclusion
do not become absolute. They can extend the networks to include nodes other
than the officially sanctioned ones, thus making sure that not only
opportunities flows beyond the borders (if there is one aspect of the EU that
is state-like, then it's the Schengen Treaty), but that new opportunities are
created precisely because the cultural micro-networks are different from the
official ones.
This is not an 'Anti-EU' strategy, which was made clear by many is picnickers
is luxury that only those who inside the EU can afford. Rather,
nettime Community Radio in Venzuela
[I have no direct knowlegde of the complex situation in Venezuela. Yet, I found this article on community radios/TVs to be very interesting. As far as I can tell, Chavez, though attacking the oligrachy (see Brian Holmes' post a few days ago), has not been shutting down, or taking over, their media. Rather, he is building up his own institutions / power bases, that run parallel to it. This might help explain why there are two highly energized groups confronting each other, both being able to organize protest with huge turn-outs. This would not be possible without access to mass media. It probably depends on one's point of view, if this is to call a new type of 'participatory democracy' or 'run-away populism'. It doesn't strike me, though, as dictatorial or authoritarian. You certainly don't have hundreds of community radios/TVs is Cuba.] March 8, 2004 CARACAS JOURNAL Pirate Radio as Public Radio, in the President's Corner By JUAN FORERO http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=509215 ARACAS, Venezuela, March 7 The sound room of Radio Perola, a small community station on the poor edge of this city, is papered with posters celebrating Latin American revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and offering a stern warning to the behemoth to the north: Death to the Yankee Invader. The setting seems fitting for José Ovalles's politically charged Saturday radio program. Gripping a microphone and waving reports from a government news agency, the white-haired retired computer teacher charges that a far-flung opposition movement arrayed against President Hugo Chávez is part of an American-led conspiracy. He ridicules the president's foes as criminals with scant backing. He urges listeners to defend what Mr. Chávez calls his Bolivarian Revolution, which is under international pressure to allow a recall vote on the president's tumultuous five-year rule. We have to fight for a free country, he said recently, one with no international interference. The message, beamed from a 13-kilowatt station in what was once the storeroom of a housing project, reaches at most a few hundred homes. But Radio Perola is part of a mushrooming chain of small government-supported radio and television stations that are central to Mr. Chávez's efforts to counter the four big private television networks, which paint him as an unstable dictator. With Venezuela on edge, stations like Radio Perola are poised to play an even bigger role in this oil-rich nation's political battle. Instead of shutting down his news media tormenters, Mr. Chávez's tactic appears to be to ignore them as much as possible while relying on former ham radio operators and low-budget television stations to get the government's message across. Although the stations say they are independent and autonomous, Mr. Chávez has announced that $2.6 million would be funneled to them this year. They also will receive technical assistance and advertising from state-owned companies. This year, we will not only legalize and enable approximately 200 more communitarian radios and televisions with equipment, but we will also promote them, the communication and information minister, Jesse Chacón, said in an interview posted on a pro-Chávez Web site. The stations have been important to Mr. Chavez's government during the current turmoil, in which the opposition has accused the government of fraudulently disqualifying hundreds of thousands of signatures for a recall referendum. Through it all, the private television and radio stations and the nation's largest newspapers have stepped up their pressure, presenting a parade of antigovernment analysts and opposition figures. Mr. Ovalles, though, calls the opposition gangsters and accuses private news organizations of faking the sizes of antigovernment marches. At first glance, the community stations and their largely volunteer staffs hardly seem political, nor do they offer the wallop of the big news organizations. Programming often deals with mundane matters like trash pickups or road conditions. The stations are staffed by volunteers, from teenagers eager for the chance to play Venezuelan hip-hop or salsa to homemakers who want to tell listeners how to stretch earnings in tough times. The main objective, say those who work at the stations, is to show there is another side to neighborhoods that, in the popular press, are presented as crime-ridden ghettos. The image of the barrios is one of criminals, violence, prostitution, where kids are abandoned, said Gabriel Gil, a producer at Catia TV, a three-year-old station that recently moved into a vast building belonging to the Ministry of Justice. We say we are television of the poor. Radio Un Nuevo Día, in a poor neighborhood, is much like the rest. Its small transmitter has been set up in the corner of a bedroom in a two-room cinder block house belonging to a cleaning woman, Zulay Zerpa. Bedsheets separate the bare-bones operation from the cots where her two children sleep. I cook, I clean, I
nettime Music Labels Tap Downloading Networks
It was long suspected that p2p usage stats could reveal more accurate user preferences than traditional traditional charts and 'hit parades'. Sad to see it implemented like this. Our hope was that we could take the technology revolution that Napster made popular and create tools for the benefit of copyright holders, said Eric Garland, BigChampagne's chief executive. Felix Music Labels Tap Downloading Networks Mon Nov 17,10:17 AM ET By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2cid=487u=/ap/file_swapping_intelligence LOS ANGELES - The recording industry, it seems, doesn't hate absolutely everything about illicit music downloading. Despite their legal blitzkrieg to stop online song-swapping, many music labels are benefiting from — and paying for -- intelligence on the latest trends in Internet trading. It's a rich digital trove these recording executives are mining. By following the buzz online, they can determine where geographically to market specific artists for maximum profitability. The record industry has always been more about vibe and hype, said Jeremy Welt, head of new media for Maverick Records in Los Angeles. For the first time, we're making decisions based on what consumers are doing and saying as opposed to just looking at radio charts. One company, Beverly Hills-based BigChampagne, began mining such data from popular peer-to-peer networks in 2000 and has built a thriving business selling it to recording labels. The company -- which takes its name from the Peter Tosh song lyric, You drink your big champagne and laugh -- taps directly into file-sharing networks like Kazaa's FastTrack. It checks on how often its clients' artists show up in searches or how frequently their songs are downloaded. The data can be sorted by market or geographical region. BigChampagne also has a TopSwaps chart that ranks the most shared songs. Rapper Eminem (news - web sites) was first in a recent scan, his songs downloaded more than 8.6 million times in one day. Our hope was that we could take the technology revolution that Napster (news - web sites) made popular and create tools for the benefit of copyright holders, said Eric Garland, BigChampagne's chief executive. The bountiful market research is gleaned from behavior for which the music industry otherwise shows no tolerance. Hurt by a three-year decline in music sales, the industry has sued the major file-sharing networks, along with individuals who have used them. It wouldn't be very smart if we weren't looking at what they're doing, Welt said. The file-sharing companies are also taking notice. This week, Altnet threatened legal action against nine companies, including BigChampagne, that it accused of violating patents on file-identifying technology. BigChampagne denies using the Altnet technology or playing any role in helping recording companies identify users for lawsuits. BigChampagne has certainly done well by file-swapping. It formed in July 2000, just as the Internet boom was beginning to bust, and now counts Maverick, DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Disney and Atlantic Records among its clients. All the major labels have worked with BigChampagne in one capacity or another, Garland said. Traditionally, labels had relied for market research largely on commercial radio, MTV and music store sales. Label executives waited weeks to get feedback based on limited audience sampling -- typically by randomly calling listeners and asking if they recognized a song after hearing a snippet. Only after several weeks would they begin to get a picture of whether a single was getting heard. And until Soundscan began electronically tracking album sales in the 1990s, the industry relied only on a survey of music retailers to gauge fan interest. The emergence of free online trading, beginning in the late 1990s with MP3.com and the original Napster, suddenly made it technologically feasible to track music consumption in a whole new way. It's the most vast and scaleable sample audience that the world has ever seen, Garland said. BigChampagne data are essentially a tally of what millions of music fans are doing every hour. Peer-to-peer systems function by sending search queries and file transfers across a network of several computer users. Every time someone searches Kazaa for a song, that query is passed along the network. BigChampagne taps in as if it were a regular user and compiles the traffic flows in a database it later sorts. What we do in effect is act like a superuser who demands access to the network in its entirety, Garland said. BigChampagne doesn't identify individuals or gather usernames, Garland said. But by analyzing users' numeric Internet addresses, BigChampagne can still pinpoint location and give clients a sense of where an artist is most popular. By using BigChampagne, labels can release a song to radio and, if there are signs demand is brewing on the song-swapping networks, immediately make the single
nettime Are all codes code?
[This is unlikely to be a legal case, though from a semiotic point of view, it's nevertheless puzzling. Is using images that are released under the GPL the same than using source code released the GPL? Is including existing images into new images, in this case, a screenshot of a kde desktop in a tv series, the same as including existing source code into a new source code? Felix] Posted by Jonathan Riddell on Friday 31/Oct/2003, @17:09 from the 24h-to-3.2beta dept. http://dot.kde.org/1067616574/ The third series of television show 24 started in the US last week. In the aim to improve security, The Counter Terrorist Unit seem to have switched operating system from MacOS to KDE [1]. Interestingly they used a 3-year-old KDE 1.x desktop. These older icons are made available under a public domain licence. If a GPL'd set of icons had been used, would we now be legally able to modify, sell and distribute the episode under the terms of the GPL over the internet? [1] http://jriddell.org/24-kde.html +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime WSJ: Can Copyright Be Saved?
[It's quite amazing, not too long ago, an outfit like the WSJ would have any questioning of the absolute enforcement of copyrights slandered the way Forbes slandered the FSF recently. Now, suddenly, even the WSJ admits that things are up for grabs and that there are valid several options. Now, you might not agree with their portraying of DRM as middle of the road solution, but just putting it out as one of several options, including a tax!, rather than the only one, is quite a significant change in itself. Felix] Can Copyright Be Saved? New ideas to make intellectual property work in the digital age By ETHAN SMITH Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 20, 2003 For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn't the content of the disc that makes it so novel, though -- it's the copyright notice that will accompany it. Instead of the standard all rights reserved, the notice will explicitly allow users of the CD to work the music into their own material. You are free ... to make derivative works, the notice will state in part. That's a significant departure from the standard copyright notice, which forbids such use of creative material and requires a legal agreement to be worked out for any exceptions. Is this the future of copyright? Perhaps. But a better way to think of it is that it's one of the possible futures of copyright. Because right now, it's all pretty much up for grabs. Blame it all on the Digital Age. As any digital downloader can tell you, technology and the Internet have made it simple for almost anyone to make virtually unlimited copies of music, videos and other creative works. With so many people doing just that, artists and entertainment companies sometimes appear helpless to prevent illegal copying, and their halting legal efforts so far have antagonized customers while hardly putting a dent in piracy. The challenge is finding a way out of this mess. Efforts fall broadly into two camps. On one side, generally speaking, are those who revel in the freedom that technology has brought to the distribution of creative material, and who believe that copyright law should reflect this newfound freedom. On the other side are those who believe that the digital age hasn't changed anything in terms of the rights of artists and entertainment companies to control the distribution of their creations and to be paid for them -- the essence of copyright law. For them, the answer is to leave copyright law intact, and to use technology to make it harder for people to make digital copies. Here's a closer look at some of the competing visions. IN THIS TOGETHER The copyright notice for Mr. Gil's coming CD is being crafted by Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that seeks to redraw the copyright landscape. Believing traditional copyrights are too restrictive, it aims to create plain-language copyright notices that explicitly offer a greater degree of freedom to those who would reshape or redistribute the copyrighted material. Traditional copyright law gives owners of creative material -- and them alone -- the right to copy or distribute their works. Although they can waive all or part of those rights, the process isn't easy and usually occurs in response to a particular request. Those hurdles, critics say, can hinder the open and freewheeling sharing of material the digital age makes possible. Creative Commons seeks to make the system more flexible by spelling out which rights the copyright holder wishes to reserve and which are being waived without waiting for a request. Artists can mix and match from among four basic licensing agreements: They can decide whether they simply want attribution anytime their work is used by someone else; whether they want to deny others use of the work for profit without permission; whether they want to prevent others from altering the material; and whether they want to permit the use of material only if the new work is offered to the public under the same terms. An underlying layer of digital code enforces the rights laid out by the owner, telling computers how a given work can be used. A Creative Commons license isn't for everyone. It might appeal to independent artists for whom free samples, distributed online, might represent an attractive marketing option, or for someone like Mr. Gil, who believes that making it easier to share and reshape his music can be an important part of the creative process. But it's unlikely to appeal to the big media companies, for which copyrighted material is what they sell. Still, Mr. Gil, who is also Brazil's culture minister, sees Creative Commons as a way to unlock the creative potential of digital technology. I'm doing it as an artist, he says. But our ministry has been following the process and getting interested in
nettime European Parliament Decision against Software Patentability
The discussion on software patents in the EU parliament in Strasbourg has triggered one of the most substantive political manifestations of the Open Source / Free Software communities in Europe to date. In Vienna, for example, there was a demonstration in front of the patent office, with a surprisingly large turnout, 300 people [1] (very few software artists, though). In other cities the story was similar [2]. These, and many other, initiatives had some success and positive last-minute admendments were introduced. Apparently, most members of parliament were rather surprised by the level of public response, as they thought this to be an uncontroversial technicality, which was how it was presented to them by the industry. Below is an evaluation of the new patent directive in Europe. As usual, there is quite a bit of uncertainty as to how it is going to be implemented. Felix [1] http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/InfoStandVienna [2] http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/InfoStands -- Forwarded Message -- Subject: [ffii] EP Decision against Software Patentability Date: Thursday 25 September 2003 09:05 From: Hartmut Pilch [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] FFII News -- For Immediate Release -- Please Redistribute +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ EU Parliament Votes for Real Limits on Patentability Strasburg 2003/09/24 For immediate Release In its plenary vote on the 24th of September, the European Parliament approved the proposed directive on patentability of computer-implemented inventions with amendments that clearly restate the non-patentability of programming and business logic, and uphold freedom of publication and interoperation. * [9]Backgrounds * [10]Media Contacts * [11]About the FFII -- www.ffii.org * [12]About the Eurolinux Alliance -- www.eurolinux.org * [13]Permanent URL of this Press Release * [14]Annotated Links Backgrounds The day before the vote, CEC Commissioner Bolkestein had [15]threatened that the Commission and the Council would withdraw the directive proposal and hand the questions back to the national patent administrators on the board of the European Patent Office (EPO), should the Parliament vote for the amendments which it supported today. It remains to be seen, whether the European Commission is committed to harmonisation and clarification or only to patent owner interests, says Hartmut Pilch, president of FFII. This is now our directive too. We must help the European Parliament defend it. The directive text as amended by the European Parliament is unbelievably good! I couldn't believe it as I was posting it article by article to the Slashdot story. It just gets better and better, and it hangs together incredibly cohesively. I think we have done something amazing this week exclaimed James Heald, a member of the FFII/Eurolinux software patent working group, as he put together the voted amendments into a [16]consolidated version. With the new provisions of article 2, a computer-implemented invention is no longer a trojan horse, but a washing machine, explains Erik Josefsson from SSLUG and FFII, who has been advising Swedish MEPs on the directive in recent weeks. That the majorities for the voted amendments had support from very different political groups - this reflects the arduous political discussion that had led to two postponements before. However, when 78 amendments are voted in 40 minutes some glitches are bound to happen: The recitals were not amended thouroughly. One of them still claims algorithms to be patentable when they solve a technical problem., says Jonas Maebe, Belgian FFII representative currently working in the European Parliament. But we have all the ingredients for a good directive. We've been able to do the rough sculpting work. Now the patching work can begin. The spirit of the European Patent Convention is 80% reaffirmed, and the Parliament is in a good position to remove the remaining inconsistencies in the second reading. The directive will have to withstand further consultation with the Council of Ministers that is more informal and hence less public than Parliamentary Procedures. In the past, the Council of Ministers has left patent policy decisions to its patent policy working party, which consists of patent law experts who are also sitting on the administrative council of the European Patent Office (EPO). This group has been one of the most determined promoters of unlimited patentability, including program claims, in Europe. Says Laura Creighton, software entrepreneur and venture capitalist, who has supported the FFII/Eurolinux campaign with donations and travelled from Sweden to Brussels several times to attend conferences and meetings with MEPs: Now those
nettime basic terms in the IP discusssion
I'm writing a little glossary for a newspaper [1] we are putting together on IP issues. The newspaper will be distributed at WSIS [2]. Better definitions are welcome. Public Good: Goods whose use is non-rivalrous, i.e. using the good does not deplete it, and non-excludable, i.e. once it is produced people cannot be excluded from using it. The light house at the coast, alerting ships of potential peril, is an example of a public good. Without intellectual property law, particularly copyrights and patents, all digital information would be a public good. Private Property: - Information owned by a private legal entity (a coporation or a individual person). The owner has exclusive rights to the property as defined by the IP law and can do as s/he pleases with it. Most importantly, the owner can freely set the conditions under which it can be accessed and used by third parties. Public Property: Information owned by the state. Within the bounds of the law and what is politically acceptable, the state can do with the information has it sees fit. Example: census data. Public Domain: -- Information that has no legal protection, either because copyrights/patents have expired, or because it has been released into the public domain by the owner. Example: the works of William Shakespear. Commons: --- A pool for information that is managed by a community of users. Acceptable use policies are set by the community. Usually, access to the resource is granted non a non-discriminatory basis and at no or low costs. Example: scientific information, open source software. [1] http://www.world-information.org/wio/wsis [2] http://www.itu.int/wsis/ +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime [Fwd: Re: [ox-en] Felix Stalder: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology]
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 19:46:55 +0200 From: Stefan Merten [EMAIL PROTECTED] Last week (9 days ago) geert lovink wrote: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology I'm not always sure in which way or to what areas the following points are limitations. These limitations refer to the kind of problems that can be addressed through the current form of social organization developed in the Open Source Movement. The way Open Source Projects are organized reflects the specifics of problem -- developing software -- and thus they cannot serve as a model to address problem with very different characteristics. This does not mean that other problems, for example, the development of drugs, cannot be organized in an open way, but this 'open way' will have to look very different from the way Open Source Software projects are organized because the problem of creating drugs is very different from the problem of creating software. In other words, there is an intimate relationship between the characteristics of the problem and the social organization of its solution. However, particularly outside the software domain, the Open Source projects remain relatively marginal. Why? Some of it can be explained by the relative newness of the approach. It takes time for new ideas to take hold and to be transferred successfully from one context to another. I'd like to underline this point. Free Software took 15-20 years to reach the public space. If I consider that period I find it promising that similar approaches are far more known today than Free Software was in the late 80's. I agree. This is why I'm very hopeful. But in order to continue the social innovation, we need to address these problems, rather than hoping they will be solved somehow by the magic of 'openness'. Let's check this. 1) Producers are not sellers The majority professional, i.e. highly-skilled, programmers do not draw their economic livelihood from directly selling the code they write. Many work for organizations that use software but do not sell it, for example as system administrators. So they sell at least the kind of workforce they use when producing Free Software. Yes, but the difference between using and selling software is important, even within the commercial sector. If you're simply using the software, you don't care if it's available to others as well (since it is anyway). If you're selling it, you need to control it. I'm not sure about the first example but for IBM workers and students Free Software is then at least to some degree an alienated thing: They don't program because of the program but because of the money they may sell their services for (IBM) or the reputation they get for it (students). I think is too simplistic to say that all work is paid or has other utilitarian motives is alienated. As a result this software is not Double Free Software as I called it on the German list some time ago because the software is written for a purpose outside the software and its concrete use value. I'm arguing that this degrades the quality of the software because of the alienation. Any evidence for this? Would be interested in seeing it. Again, I think this is simplistic. Many students love what they do. The fact that they get a degree for it is an additional motivation, but a detraction. Unfortunately AFAIK there is no study yet which tries to answer the question which amount of Free Software is written under alienated conditions and which amount is Double Free Software. I guess one of the reasons why this hasn't happened is that it's simply impossible to define what alienated means within any degree of empirical relevance in this context. We are speaking of highly-skilled, self-motivated professionals, and not about people in the assembly line. The contexts are different and the differences matter. However, I can't see where the limitation is here. Oekonux argues that it is one of the basic *strengths* of Free Software that it is not sold by those who create it. This way the creators can focus on the use value of the software alone and are not obstructed by marketing needs. Exactly this is one of the reasons why Free Software is so successful. I'm not saying that the limitations make Open Source Software bad, but that they limit its social model in terms of the problems to which it can be applied. So I'd argue that this is not an limitation to spread the principles of Free Software to other areas but a precondition. Felix' argument makes sense only if you assume that each little piece of work / effort needs to be sold. However, this is not true for *lots* of areas in human life. One instance close to software is the hobby sector where people spend lots of efforts including spending money. The only reward they get is the Selbstentfaltung they experience while doing their hobby. This reminds me of a discussion I had about a year ago
nettime RIP: Walter Ong
Rev. Walter J. Ong; traced the history of communication By Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times, 8/16/2003 ttp://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2003/08/16/rev_walter_j_ong_traced_the_history_of_communication LOS ANGELES -- The Rev. Walter J. Ong, a Jesuit priest and a leading scholar in the field of language and culture who traced the transition from oral to written communication in his more than 20 books, died Tuesday at St. Mary's Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. He was 90. In his writings and lectures, Father Ong explored the development of communication from its preliterate beginnings to its current reliance on radio, television, and the Internet. He was fascinated by the transition from one form of communication to another. He used ancient stories such as Homer's Odyssey to demonstrate that preliterate cultures relied on oral thought, in which the storyteller might contradict himself and the story itself might change over time until it was written down. He contrasted oral tradition with the written, using the works of Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle to illustrate the change. A written text relies on a set of ground rules for logical reasoning, as well as a consistent use of terms, to communicate information. The two traditions influenced cultural values, Father Ong pointed out. Although an oral society places a high value on communal memory and the elders who are the main link to history, a literate one focuses on individual reasoning and introspection. The rise of technology introduced other changes. In a high-tech culture, a person reads a novel and imagines a movie in his mind. The Internet blurs people's exterior and interior worlds. Virtual reality is no longer a private matter. Father Ong's meticulous research on those developments helped lay the foundation for an understanding of modern media culture. Some of his research corresponded with the work of his famous teacher, Marshall McLuhan, whose interest in the history of the verbal arts in Western culture inspired Father Ong to pursue his own studies. He was McLuhan's student in graduate school when he completed a master's degree in English at St. Louis University. McLuhan was a faculty member from 1937 to 1944. (Father Ong went on from there to earn a doctorate at Harvard University.) Although McLuhan became a pop-culture guru in the 1960s -- global village, his term for the interconnectedness of the world by mass media, is now included in Webster's Dictionary -- Father Ong remained a scholar's scholar. His writing style was dense and complex, not easy to grasp. His ideas were subtle and cumulative, not catchy. His most highly regarded book, for example, is titled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (1982). Ong is the sort of guy the experts read, said Thomas J. Farrell, whose book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies (Hampton Press, 2000) has helped make the priest's work more accessible. Born in Kansas City, Mo., on Nov. 30, 1912, Father Ong said he knew he wanted to be a priest from the time he was in high school. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1935 and was ordained in 1946. He spent most of his teaching career in the English department at St. Louis University. He taught courses in Renaissance literature, his specialty, along with a range of others. He also lectured at Oxford University, Yale Divinity School, and a number of other top schools around the world until he retired in 1991. Despite Father Ong's academic achievements, he was first and foremost a priest, Farrell said. He said daily Mass at 5:30 a.m., regularly heard confessions, and wore cleric's garb wherever he went. Father Ong's academic work only strengthened his belief in God. God created the evolving world, and it's still evolving, he told the St. Louis Post Dispatch in March 2002. +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
Hi Ben, I would be hesitant to define the open source approach solely or even primarily in terms of the characteristics you mention. Perhaps I did not put it as clearly as I should have. I did not mean to characterize the open source approach in terms of its internal organization. Rather, my focus was on the characteristics of the problems to which it has been so far applied successfully. I totally agree that, from organizational point of view, the points you list such as open participation are very important. Your list is fully consistent with my elaborations. The fact that software, or an encyclopedia, do not come with any product liability *does* facilitates open collaboration. If you could sue, say, the Apache Software Foundation for a server crash, or Wikipedia for erroneous information, I'm sure their development model would look different. The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, general-purpose model. I'm skeptical about the possibility of a workable, general-purpose model. My post was about the fact that the type of problem affects the social organization through which the solution is being developed. Different types of problems demand different types organizations to address them. You cannot organize the development of drugs the same way you organize the development of software. For one, very few people would be willing to be beta-testers. There are certain aspects that will be universal to all open development processes, such as common ownership of knowledge. However, the type of social organization in which commonly owned knowledge can be created will be vastly different depending on the type of knowledge. So far, we have learned how to create commonly owned knowledge as long as the type of knowledge exhibits, among others, the six characteristics I listed. The next round of social innovation is about finding ways to create free knowledge / information in other areas as well. +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology The Open Source Approach to develop informational goods has been spectacularly successful, particularly in the area for which it was developed, software. Also beyond software, there are important, successfull Open Source projects such as the free Encyclopedia, Wikipedia; collaborative sites writing/publishing projects such as koro5hin.org; and the Distributed Proofreading Project, attached to the Gutenberg Project. However, particularly outside the software domain, the Open Source projects remain relatively marginal. Why? Some of it can be explained by the relative newness of the approach. It takes time for new ideas to take hold and to be transferred successfully from one context to another. But this is only part of the story. The other part is that the current development model is based on a number of specific, yet unacknowledged conditions that limit its applicability to more diverse contexts, say the music distribution or drug research. The boundaries to the open production model as it has been established in the last decade are set by six conditions characterizing virtually all of the success stories of what Benkler called commons-based peer production. The following list is a conceptual abstraction, a kind of ideal-type. The actual configuration and relative importance of each condition varies from project to project, but taken together they indicate the boundaries of the current model. In this elaboration, I draw from examples of free and open source software, but it would be simple to illustrate these limitation based on open content projects. 1) Producers are not sellers The majority professional, i.e. highly-skilled, programmers do not draw their economic livelihood from directly selling the code they write. Many work for organizations that use software but do not sell it, for example as system administrators. For them the efficient solution of particular problems is of interest, and if that solution can be found and maintained by collaborating with others, the sharing of code is not an issue. For others employed in private sector companies, for example at IBM, the development of free software is the basis for selling services based on that code. The fact that some people can use that code without purchasing the services is more than off-set by being able to base the service on the collective creativity of the developer community at large. From IBM's point of view, the costs of participating in open software development can be regarded as 'capital investment' necessary for the selling of the resulting product: services. For members of academia (faculty and students) writing code, but not selling (often explicitly prohibited), contributes to their professional goals, be it as part of their education, be it as part of their professional reputation-building. For them, sharing of code is not only part of their professional advancement, but an integral part of the professional culture that sustains them also economically,. in form of salaries for the faculty and stipends for the (graduate) students. Last but not least are all those who use their professional skills outside the professional setting, for example at home on evenings and weekends. Having already secured their financial stability, they can now pursue other interests using the same skill set. 2) Limited capital investment Particularly the last, and very important group of people, whose who work outside the institutional framework on projects based on their own idiosyncratic interests, can only exist due to the fact that the means of production are extraordinarily inexpensive and accessible. Materially, all that is needed is a standard computer (often even a substandard one would already suffice) and a fast, reliable connection to the communication forums of the community. Of course, the computer and the network rely on a level of infrastructure that cannot be taken for granted in large parts of the world, but for most people in the centers of development, they are within relatively easy reach. Once this access to be means of communication is secured, the skills necessary to participate in the development of code can also be acquired collaboratively, free of charge. The number of self-taught programmers is significant. Since no expensive diplomas are necessary to become active, the financial hurdle is, indeed, extraordinarily low. 3) High number of potential contributors Programming knowledge is becoming relatively common knowledge, no longer restricted to an engineering elite, but widely distributed throughout society. Of course, truly great programmers are rare as truly great artists are, but average professional knowledge is widely available. This has a quantitative and a qualitative dimensions. Quantitatively, the number of able programmers is in the millions, and rising. Qualitatively, the range of people capable programmers is also unusually wide,
nettime Open Source translation of Harry Potter
After distributed proofreading [1], now distributed translating. According to this website [2] more than 1000 people contributed to the translation into German of Harry Potter 4. Now, they are translating volume 5, which has been released in English but not yet in German. The way it works: volunteers sign up, then they are assigned 5 pages to translate within 4 weeks (they have to procure the English original themselves). If they translation meets the required standards, the contributor will receive acess to the other translated pages. The ensure a certain consistency, there is a HP-special dictionary [3]. In addition, this project also translates additional chapters written by HP fans, English-German and German-English. The translated texts are not available to the public at large. They only circulate within the community of translators and others who contribute to the project. This, it seems, helps to keep the publisher from getting nervous. It's a typical fan project, as they encourage people to translate on their own a set of pages, even is a translation already exists, and the stated motivation is a) fun and b) the act of translating leads to a deeper understanding of the text. [1] http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php [2] http://www.harry-auf-deutsch.de/ [2] http://www.hp-fc.de +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime nettime 3000?
Right at the time when nettime reached the arbitrary yet symbolic number of 3000 subscribers, the number of error messages flooding the nettime system reached such proportions (several hundreds a day) that we were finally forced to go through the boring process of unsubscribing those addresses that were clearly broken. Within days, nettime got purged of 10% of its subscribers. All in all, this was an utterly unspectacular process, spring cleaning if you will, but makes me wonder, nevertheless, what kind of community is this in which 10% of the 'members' are dead, so to speak. So, what kind of community is it? Clearly, it's no longer the hybrid structured by the two intersecting vectors of online exchanges and off-line events, back-packing on the European media festival circuit. These ain't the 90s anymore. Rather, the last time (as far as I know) a significant number of 'nettimers' were physically in the same place -- at the WOS II in late 2001 in Berlin -- was a non-event. Just a bunch of people happening to be together drinking beer in clubs where one could not communicate with anyone who was more than 1 meter away. There was no sense of being a group, rather communication unfolded as a series of friendly, or disinterested, individual encounters. Physically, there was no many-to-many communication, just one-to-one. At the same time, nettime in terms of its online exchanges is doing quite well. It's a stable, reliable, perhaps a bit predictable (the flip side of reliable), long-term project. I personally don't know of another list that is comparable in terms of breadth and quality of content. It seems that, as a community, nettime has been moving in the opposite direction of what is usually understood as the normal 'maturing' process of a virtual community, namely, that on-line exchange sooner or later create the desire for off-line meetings. For nettime, off-line events -- meetings, paper publications -- were crucially important initially but steadily declined to the point that when the last nettime publication appeared (as part of Vuk Cosic's Biennale catalogue) only a fraction of list subscribers (perhaps not even all of those whose texts were reprinted) even noticed. A lot of this has to do with the subscriber base becoming more diverse (geographically, socially, intellectually), the early enthusiasm wearing off and the distributed, non-ownership, volunteer model showing its conservative tendencies. This needs to be qualified. Ownership here is not understood in these sense of being the property of someone, but in the sense of 'taking ownership' and assuming responsibility. Who is responsible for nettime? Of course, there are some responsibilities. If the email server goes down, the phone at The Thing will ring. If something on the web server needs to be changed, the action is in Amsterdam. And the moderation does daily maintenance work. But responsible in the sense of being able to make decision beyond minor tinkering is no-one. So, things stay the same as far as the technical is concerned. Nevertheless, socially, things have changed quite a bit, the community has become more virtual in all senses. Perhaps, this has to do with the relative maturing of other networks, say social forums, art festivals or conferences, which are more efficient at providing real meeting places for more narrowly defined (but more populous) groups whose sense of community is more comprehensive. In a way, nettime has always defined itself negatively. Being sponsored by art institutions, but not being an art project itself. Having lots of intellectuals on board, but being non-academic. Having a strong political slant, but not being affiliated with any particular segment of the multitude. In a time where institutions enjoy a new found respect, nettime, once again, goes against the trend, becoming more virtual, more distributed, more ephemeral. This process is not explicit, but it's clearly felt, as could be witnessed by the last major discussion on the list which, by no means a co-incidence, was about the institutionalization of another once hybrid project: rhizome. A discussion that, from the outside was supremely absurd -- after all, how important is a $5 membership fee, really -- but from the inside, it seemed to touch a strange cord, one that indicates that nettime still has a 'sense of self', which, not surprisingly, is still defined negatively. +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime anti-piracy goons considered harmful
At 03.02.03 19:14, Morlock Elloi wrote: The only way to benefit from openness is to use it and verify yourself, insteadof delluding yourself that someone out there will spend days doing that for ...what ? There are certainly advantages to doing things yourself (just ask all the guys hanging around 'home depot'), but there are also clear limitations to it. In how many areas can one be truly proficient? In very few, at best. I think it was said of Goethe that he was the last person to be able to command the entire (scientific) knowledge available at the time. The Germans even have an expression for this: Universalgelehrter. This, unfortunately, was nearly 200 years ago and the amount of knowledge available has exploded many times to a degree that there is probably nobody around who fully understands even a clearly circumscribed domain such as a computer. I have no idea of aviation (beyond stretching my arm out of the window of a speeding car) but I still have a couple of frequent flyer accounts. Does that make me a naive fool? Not necessarily, since there are social institutions around, say the FAA in the US, whose mandate is to ensure aviation safety. They verify the safety of airplanes, airports etc. Now, the trick for such institutions to work is that a) there need to be the resources around to get the job done, and b) the conditions need to be right so that the job is doable at all. In respect to software, if you do not have access to the source code, there is very little you can do, no matter what your resources are, in order check the specifics of the program, particularly not in regard to hidden features or bugs. In effect you are forced to blindly trust the vendor of the software. The vendor, of course, has an interest in maintaining the reputation of the product, so he will never tell you that something is wrong with it (particularly since there is no liability). Opening up the source code, at the very least, provides the conditions under which the job of verifying the software becomes doable. Of course, that does not mean necessarily that someone with a keen eye is actually doing it. Which gets us to the question of where the resources come from to do the checking. This clearly is a tricky problem. What are the social institutions supporting OS development in the long run? While much needs remains to be developed, it's not that we are standing at the beginning of the process. The way OS projects are organized -- collaboratively and open -- optimizes the chances that bugs are found and minimizes the possibilities that someone is able to hide a feature in it. Furthermore, only one person has to find the bug (and fix it) for it to become available to all users. On the other hand, even if you find a bug in an M$ program, chances are, your neighbour will never know it, because you are not allow to tell him and M$ won't do it. Note that I say optimizes the chances and one person has to find the bug both are strong conditionals. There is no guarantee here. But also doing it yourself is not really one, since how do you know that you fully understood the code? IBetter assume you don't. I guess there were a lot of intelligent people looking at the source code of PGP and still, a bug eluded all of them for a long time. Chances are nobody found the bug nobody could exploit it. But once the bug was found, it was published readily increasing the chances of it being fixed. The answer to the imperfections of OSS is not to verify yourself, after all, the answer to the difficulties of writing good software is also not to write it yourself, but to distribute the process to those willing and able to do it. What we need to find now, are institutions capable of sustaining this process. So far, OSS hasn't done badly on this front either. Felix --|- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime revenge of the concept
In his excellent paper, Coase's Penguin: Linux and The Nature of the Firm, Yochai Benkler explains, not the motivation, but the technical and legal preconditions for cooperative informational and cultural production. The technical considerations are basically: telematically interlinked personal computers. The legal precondition is basically: that information be treated as what it arguably is, a non-rivalrous good, i.e. a resource that can't run out, that can't be destroyed in the using, and that therefore cannot be treated as an ownable commodity. Benkler's conclusion is that networked informational and cultural production obeys neither the constraints of a firm (with a bureaucratic organization), nor the price signals given by a market (buy and sell are irrelevant to non-rivalrous goods). So Benkler is talking about a form of production which is at once non-bureaucratic and, yes, non-capitalist, i.e. divorced from that complex and changeable human institution which transnational state capitalism now dominates almost entirely: the market. I think 'non-capitalism' is a missreading of Benkler's argument and of the Open Source Software phenomenon. I deliberately say OSS and not Free Software, since such a reading might apply more narrowly to FS (though I'm not even sure about that) but certainly not to the OSS in general. I think (non)capitalism is a category that doesn't help much explaining the practive of OSS (as supposed to some of the political theories that motivate some of the FS/OSS figures). What Benkler said in this essay, which is indeed brilliant, is that conventional economists know only of two ways how to organize production: within a closed organization (the firm, the bureaucracy) and in an open system (the market). The question is always: how to achieve efficient organization of people and resources in regard to a desired productive outcome. Signals used to achieve this coordination within the closed structure are commands relayed through hierachies. In the open structure, it's money: prices attached to goods (and services). What he claims now, and I basically agree with him, is that a third way of organizing labour has emerged, heavily relying on the Internet. He calls it 'commons-based peer production.' Now, there are capitalist firms and non-capitalist 'firms' (state bureaucracies, co-ops) and there are capitalist and non-capitalist markets. A traditional farmer's market, for example, is not a capitalist market. Just remember Fernand Braudel's distinction between markets and anti-markets which Manuel DeLanda dusted off a few years ago (check the nettime archives). In the same sense, there is capitalist 'commons-based peer production' (think of Amazon's way to recommend books, or IBM's investment in Linux, Redhat and so on). There's also non-capitalist 'commons-based peer production' (say, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia, nettime and so on). What is perhaps most interesting is how the 'capitalist' and 'non-capitalist' elements intersect and what that might tell us about the politcal dimension of these movements. I think it's exactly this hybridity (along with the limitation to non-rivalrous goods and even more, to 'functional works') that makes the OSS phenomenon very interesting but only of limited value as a political project (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Felix --|- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
