The Pirate Party
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.
Herkko Hietanen on a net radio show
I just listened to the first show on the net radio Radio Free Finland. One of the two guests in the show was Herkko Hietanen, an IP scholar and one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Finland. They talked about Creative Commons, software patents, p2p and the case Lehtovaara. All the shows will be archived on the web site.
Bit nervous, some tech problems but otherwise very fine first show!
Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property
From the Creative Commons blog:
A new book by author Phillipe Aigrain - “Cause commune : l’information entre bien commun et propriété” (or, in English, “Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property”) has been released online in French under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Selected extracts in English are also available online. Editions Fayard may be one of the first major mainstream French-speaking publishers to facilitate Creative Commons licenses. Let’s hope it serves as an example to open up more French-speaking (and other) content by mainstream publishers for freedom of use.
The book looks like an interesting foray into the politics of the “information age”. I wish somebody will translate it. Unfortunately, translations are forbidden by the license.
New Open Access Journal on Copyright
There’s new peer-reviewed open access journal called Copyright, edited by Lawrence Lessig and Michael Geist. They publish articles on copyright and its effects in the Internet age. They promise rapid review (2 weeks) and quick publication and welcome also opinion pieces. While the journal accepts papers produced in traditional fashion, there’s also a chance for collaborative work. Papers can be co-written through the wiki in a true collaborative fashion. Very interesting approach!
The list of accepted topics is broad:
Copyright seeks articles on all topics related to copyright, including:
- Digital Rights Management
- Quantitative studies of the effects of legislation
- Scholarly communication and Open Access
- Peer-to-peer networks
- International copyright
- Collaborative authorship
- Blogs and other new media
- Collaborative filtering
- Copyright in developing nations
- Social implications of copyright
They write: “Copyright is structured to be a new type of journal, not just a place to publish ideas but a locus to generate them–vital in an area of academic interest largely composed of subdisciplines of other fields.” This a great attempt to create a lively research community and discussion forum.
WIPO discussion on IP
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.
