Eräitä huomioita

According to Aftonbladet (in Swedish), Swedish filesharers are planning to form a party for the Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2006. The agenda of the Pirate Party is to:

• abolition of all intellectual property rights
• Sweden must secede from international IP treaties
• abolition of laws that forbid or limit distribution of information
• right to privacy must be defined in the constitution and be protected harder.

The party would concentrate on these issues only and stay outside the left/right division. The approximate number of filesharers in Sweden is one million, which is about 11 % of the population.

The party will use the traditional Jolly Roger as their symbol.

WIPO has opened a forum for discussion on IP:

The WIPO Online Forum is designed to enable and encourage an open debate on issues related to intellectual property in the information society, and in light of the goals of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

I hope the input will be taken into account. Next part of the WSIS process will take place in
Tunis, from 16 to 18 November 2005.

Mikko Välimäki has published his PhD disseration on open source licensing on the web. The book is called The Rise of Open Source Licensing. A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry. The book is on different licensing models but also has bits on history of the movement and history of copyright and patents. It looks very interesting. I recommend you to take a look.

I’ve noticed a lot of buzz about open source among e-learning folks, but I thought it’s just about the low cost, a point of view I don’t find theoretically interesting at all. Then I heard Graham Attwell speak at ITK 2005. Teemu Arina made some notes about Attwell’s presentation:

According to Graham, Open Source is a good thing for education. Open Source software is able to reflect on particular pedagogical approaches. Previously on the LMS [Learning Management System] dominated market, management was the paradigm instead of learning. In that sense, educational software improved in the way how it operated and not in conceptual terms. The reason for shift towards more pedagogic thinking is mainly because of Open Source.

Although Teemu writes about a different session than the one I attended, the point is still the same: that free/open software enables users to produce software that is based on more flexible ideas of pedagogy and different values. It allows us to create different pedagogies, experiment and fool around. It seems to me that different technologies embed different social values, and you can see this in the field of educational software: whether it’s the “Intellectual property”-driven idea of a learning product or learning as participation in a knowledge creation community - be it in an intranet, www, wiki, or something else - let’s leave the technical solution open for the learners and educators.