rights

iCommons Summit

The third annual iCommons summit will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia (15-17 June) and this year I have the good fortune to be able to attend.

The event includes people like Creative Commons CEO, Larry Lessig, CC Chairman and Digital Entrepreneur, Joi Ito, Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales and CTO of Linden Labs, Cory Ondrejka. We have also add some new voices to the debate this year including Indiaâ??s Lawrence Liang who has become renowned for his considered commentary on the positive impact of piracy in developing countries, Jonathan Zittrain discussing themes from his new book â??The Future of the Internet and How to Stop Itâ??, Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT who will talk about competing visions of â??free cultureâ?? from the free software perspective, and Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group, who will talk about successful campaigns to rid the world of restrictive IP laws.

I am really looking forward to it and to meeting all the other commoners. Naturally the event will be blogged 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Capitalism 3.0

Are you drowning in books to be read? Sometimes I think that I am. Then while I am in the middle of the deep end of the pool, instead of a life buoy, another book comes skimming across the water. This time it was Peter Barnes’ book Capitalism 3.0 which is available both as in a Pdf file (licensed under Creative Commons naturally) and in the more comfortable paper variety.

After scanning through the pdf I ordered the book. Barnes’ argument is based on the idea that capitalism is flawed and needs to take the Commons into consideration. He takes a broad view of the commons which includes headings such as nature, community and culture. Based upon this view he attempts to draw together the diversity of our commons and connect it to the capitalist approach to business.

 

 The book is critical of the accesses of old capitalism (which Barnes calls Capitalism 2.0). But he is also a bit too positive to what capitalism has done well – but a good book must be one that you disagree with in parts. Barnes attempts to show that Capitalism 3.0 has a chance of alleviating some of the access of capitalism 2.0 and he ends his book on a positive note:

Capitalism 2.0 had its moments. It defeated communism, leveled national boundaries to trade, and brought material abundance never seen before. But its triumph was accompanied by huge unpaid bills, debts that are now coming due. Perhaps we ought to think of ourselves as a company in bankruptcy. We canâ??t pay all of our bills, but we can pay some, especially if we stretch the payments out. In some cases, we can compensate debt holders with equity. In any event, we need to reorganize our economy so, in the future, we donâ??t run up the same debts again. Thatâ??s what
Capitalism 3.0 would do.

But Capitalism 3.0 also has a higher purpose: to help both capitalism and the human species achieve their full potential. To do that, our economic machine must stop destroying the commons and start protecting it. At the same time, it must lift the bottom 95 percent of humans at a faster rate than it raises the top 5 percent. This requires more than compassionate rhetoric, or a few bandages around the edges. It requires an upgrade of our operating system.

You can either buy a copy of the book or, if you prefer it, download it from the Capitalism 3.0 website.

Posted on by mklang

Employee's Privacy: No Monitoring

This comes straight from the latest EDRI newsletter:

The Welsh Government, through Carmarthenshire College, was found in breach of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for having monitored one of the college employee’s e-mails, internet traffic and
telephone calls.

As the College is publicly funded, Lynette Copland sued the government for infringing Art.8 of the European Convention on Human Rights that says “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home
and his correspondence”.

The government argued that the monitoring was carried out in order to establish whether Copland had extensively used college resources for personal communication, but the court ruled that: “The court is not convinced by the government’s submission that the college was authorised under its statutory powers to do ‘anything necessary or expedient’ for the purposes of providing higher and further education, and finds the argument unpersuasive”.

Copland claimed that her correspondence had been monitored for about 18 months by the headmaster of the college who even contacted some of the people with whom she had communicated to ask for the nature of their communications. The government admitted the monitoring but stated it had lasted only a few months.

The Court ruling was that “According to the court’s case-law, telephone calls from business premises are prima facie covered by the notions of ‘private life’ and ‘correspondence’ ” and that “It follows logically that emails sent from work should be similarly protected under article eight, as should information derived from the monitoring of personal internet usage.”

“The applicant in the present case had been given no warning that her calls would be liable to monitoring, therefore she had a reasonable expectation as to the privacy of calls made from her work telephone. The same expectation
should apply in relation to the applicant’s e-mail and internet usage.”

The college had no policy to inform employees they might be monitored and Copland had received no warning on this.

“The ruling is important in that it reinforces the need for a statutory basis for any interference with respect to private use of a telecommunications system by an employee… The lawful business practice regulations [part of RIPA] allow an employer to monitor and intercept business communications, so the Court is implying that private use of a telecommunications system, assuming it is authorised via an acceptable use policy, can be protected.” said Dr Chris Pounder, a privacy specialist at Pinsent Masons.

The Court awarded Copland 3,000 Euros in damages and 6,000 Euros in costs and expenses.

European Court of Human Rights – Copland vs. The United Kingdom (3.04.2007)
http://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/2007/253.html

EU court rules monitoring of employee breached human rights (5.04.2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/05/monitoring_breached_human_rights/

Court of Human Rights protects the private use of the Internet (4.04.2007)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/87867

Monitoring of employee breached human rights, says European court
(4.04.2007)
http://www.out-law.com/page-7936

Posted on by mklang

Stallman in Göteborg

This is really cool. Richard Stallman will be giving a lecture in Göteborg in May.

The Free Software Foundation Europe and Göteborg University are pleased to invite you to a lecture with Dr. Richard Stallman:

Free Software and Beyond: Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works

Dr. Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement: defending essential freedoms for the users of software. In addition, he will address how the ideas of free software do or don’t extend to other kinds of published works. He will also explain what the Pirate Party must change in its program to avoid unintended negative consequences in the software field.

Dr. Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and president of the Free Software Foundation. He has received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, the University of Glasgow, Free University of Brussels and Universidad Nacional de Salta. In 1990, he was the receiver of a Macarthur foundation fellowship and has been elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture will take place at:

University Aula
Göteborg University
Vasaparken
Göteborg, Sweden

May 16th
From 5pm to 8pm

While the lecture is a public event, and we invite you to forward this invitation to whomever you feel might be interested, we kindly request that in order to participate, you register via http://www.rms2007.se/registrering

Posted on by mklang

Rewards of Plagiarism

Back in May last year I wrote about a case of plagiarism from my university. The interesting thing about this plagiarism was that it was a teacher who had stolen part of a masters thesis written by two students whom she had supervised.

At the department of business studies two students wrote their masters thesis. Their supervisor then took parts of the text and included it word for word in an article she presented at an international conference. The students were not acknowledged in any way. The head of department defended the supervisorâ??s actions in the student press â?? which is sad, but in a sense an understandable defence. Still sad and it shows a definite lack of backbone. (this blog in May 2006)

The local newspaper reports that the case has been under review again and that this time the plagiarizing researcher is not being defended. She has, according to the experts, not followed good research practice and the case is clearly one of plagiarism.

The embarrassment must have been bad when the department defended the plagiarizing researcher, but now that the guilty opinion has been delivered it must be really bad. In addition the whole department that defended her actions as common practice really has egg on its face now.

Good. Stealing other peoples work is not acceptable. Stealing from students is unacceptable and really quite pathetic.

Posted on by mklang

Been Offline

Since I spent the weekend moving I have been unable to go online. Actually my online behavior of late can at best be called erratic. All due to the weekends activities. The tough part about this is not so much getting organised afterwards (which is terrible) but to attempt to catch up on all the reading. My inbox, rss reader and real life reading have piled up in an incredible way. This all makes me feel like Chaplin in the film “Modern Times“.

The lack of time to read is a common complaint. This is also connected to the increase in channels of information pouring in. Some of the choices are easy, while others are tough to lose for nostalgic reasons. Less or no television, skip the daily newspaper, more focused book reading, attempting to focus on one task at a time (rather than multitasking) and generally staying on top of all information flows by not allowing them to pile up.

Was it always like this? Obviously the couple of hundred feeds in my rss is new. How should one cope with the information one wants to maintain without becoming a simplified one-track person? In Republic.com Cass Sunstein writes about the daily me. This is the idea that users will tailor their information needs and ignore all “unnecessary” information. The result can be the creation of groups of outsiders who are unable to relate to their local groups.

Posted on by mklang

Bad Attitude

The blog Bad Vista puts a nice perspective on the difference in attitude between free and proprietary software:

As the GPL preamble says:

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users.

In contrast, a typical Microsoft Vista EULA says:

The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways.

See the difference in attitude?

Posted on by mklang

Recommendation Mapping

Recommender systems are nothing new. The list of books on the side of this blog is generated by LibraryThing which has a very nice recommender system. It analysis your library and then recommends books contained in other users libraries. Amazon tends to use recommender systems and recommends customers that people who bought a certain book also bought certain other books.

This is nothing new. But when I came across Amaznode I was pleasantly surprised by the graphical representations of their recommendations (which are based on Amazon). The system creates a web of books which others have bought. This is a cute way of representing data.

Posted on by mklang

Rare Book Room

Wow – I have just found the Rare Book Room (via Stingy Scholar). It is an educational website intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world â??s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

In particular the site contains:

1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.

2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

3. A complete set of Poor Richardâ??s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.

4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg â??s Bible (from the Library of Congress), Harvey’s book on the circulation of blood, Galileo â??s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.

Posted on by mklang