IT/communications

Introduction
Copyright gives authors exclusive control of the use of a growing number of forms of artistic expression.
Often, it is not the authors who own those rights, but gigantic cultural enterprises. They manage not only the production, but also the distribution and marketing of a large proportion of films, music, theatre, literature, soap operas, visual arts and design. That gives them far-reaching powers in deciding what we see, hear or read, in which setting and, above all, what we don’t see, hear or read.

by Ricardo Ramirez, Garth Graham, Fred Bigham and Daniel Pellerin

David M. Berry Giles Moss, Free Software Magazine n. 2, March 2005

A constellation of interests is now seeking to increase its
ownership and control of creativity. We are told that these
interests require new laws and rights that will allow them to
control concepts and ideas and protect them from exploita-
tion. They say that this will enrich our lives, create new
products and safeguard the possibility of future prosperity.
But this is a disaster for creativity, whose health depends on
an ongoing, free and open conversation between ideas from
the past and the present.

Free Software Magazine, Issue 5, June 2003

On the face of it, the Creative Commons project appears to be a success. It has generated interest in the issue of intellectual property and the erosion of the “public domain”, and it has contributed to re-thinking the role of the “commons” in the “information age”. It has provided institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to ex- periment and communicate with culture more freely. A growing number of intellectual and artistic workers are now enrolling in the Creative Commons network and exercising the agency and freedom it has made available. Yet despite these efforts, questions remain about the Creative Commons
project’s aims and intentions and the vision of free culture that it offers. These questions become all the more signif- icant as the Creative Commons develops into a more influ- ential and voluble “representative” and public face for libre culture.

Laura Murray
First Monday, October 2004


Canada is at a critical stage in the development of its copyright law: it has not yet ratified the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization "Internet Treaties," but it is poised to do so. This article analyses the rhetoric of "protection" ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators. These "common sense" ideas, fostered by rights–holder lobbies, emerge out of a peculiar Canadian history of cultural nationalism(s), but they may not promote the interests of Canadians. Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium. The participation of Canadians in national and global interaction is crucial to the Canadian public interest, and must not be forgotten in the rush to protection. Beyond its analysis of this specific proposal, this paper calls for a copyright policy in line with the Canadian tradition of balancing private and public interests.

Lords of Cyberspace: The Return of the Rentier by Roberto Verzola, Philippine Greens
(Presented at World Social Forum, Mumbai, India, January 18, 2004)

The information sector: Economics 101

An information economy (previously called a post-industrial or knowledge economy, also called a cyber-economy) is an economy whose information sector has become more dominant than its industrial or agriculture sectors. The information sector is that sector of the economy that produces, handles, or transfers information goods. At the core of this sector are information and communications technologies (ICT) for generating, manipulating, distributing and using information.

IMAGINING A WORLD WITHOUT COPYRIGHT

The market and temporary protection a better alternative for artists and the public domain

An essay by Marieke van Schijndel & Joost Smiers

Hard to imagine

Some serious cracks are surfacing in the system of copyright, as we have
known it in the Western world for a couple of centuries. The system is
substantially more beneficial for cultural conglomerates than for the
average artist; a situation that cannot last. Furthermore, it seems
inescapable that digitisation is undermining the foundations of the
copyright system. It must be acknowledged that several authors have

Patent absurdity
Richard Stallman

If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman

The Guardian UK, Monday June 20, 2005

Next month, the European Parliament will vote on the vital question of whether to allow patents covering software, which would restrict every computer user and tie software developers up in knots. Many politicians may be voting blindly - not being programmers, they don't understand what software patents do. They often think patents are similar to copyright law (except for some details), which is not the case.

Property, Propriety, and Appropriation

Our comments extend our mutual scholarly interest in the articulation of discourses of property in contemporary capitalist culture and how these are deployed in the narrative conjuring of capital as “salvific” moral virtue in global neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). We are interested in how narratives of property and propriety, ownership, and entitlement come to be embodied and performed as moral stories in digital environments (Coombe and Herman 2000, Coombe and Herman 2001). As Marx argued “capital” is a “very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical and theological niceties” (Marx 1976[1867]:163). Capital is strange for Marx because it can apparently morph into so many different forms—as commodity, as debt, as labor, as knowledge, as brand image, and, underlying these, money as the universal, impersonal standard of value that makes these commensurable. Yet these strange and magical qualities of capital rest upon a foundation of metaphysics and theology—a particular set of ethical values that construe lifeworlds into monetary forms and human beings into autonomous individuals.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

by Eric S. Raymond

Date: 1997/06/23 23:40:25 $

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I anatomize a successful free-software project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of FSF and its imitators versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of