Copyright and the state

Originally uploaded by stephen_downes

Ok here i go with the second post on copyright…

I want to talk about copyrighted material created by stated funded or state owned institutions.
The first occurrence of that happened to me last April, i wanted to visit the computer science class on databases. Now i was pretty busy, so i couldn’t really attend to the lecture more than once or twice… “Not a problem!” i thought, usually people leave extensive material on the internet, especially in cs classes. well that was kind of true, but to access it you needed to be a student of the university (i wasn’t at that time) and go through a fairly complicated registration process using the “Matrikelnummer” and other official data… That was the end of my effort to learn more about databases, at least in Münster.

Why am I saying this, well in a sense this effort to “hide” knowledge, to block access from the public, is basically what every university do when they publish copyrighted material. Why are expensive state funded research published on elsevier? It is so expensive that we couldn’t afford to have it at our institute… (it’s not that relevant for us either, explaining why we prefer not spending the money on them). That might be ok for private university, but for state funded research, the product belongs to the citizen and should be made accessible. I fail to see why university, whose purpose is to preserve, spread and create knowledge should make the teaching content it creates inaccessible to the people they serve (they are civil servants after all). The refreshing and novel approach of (private university Stanford) that gives their classes out for free on itunes and youtube, they aren’t the only one. For more university sharing content for free over the internet see open culture. On the subject of scientific publication i’d like to point to this great article by ars technica, who depicts the current struggle and surprises of the american congress while they where trying to open up acces to state funded medical research.

But that’s not the end, another hilarious story (via crunchgear) was about a student getting sued in germany for creating an iPhone app that was able to provided train schedules for public transport in Berlin, because there is a freaking copyright on the train schedule ! How dumb is that? Who does the train schedule belong to? I would probably in my lack of legal n´knowledge say to no one, or if anyone then the citizen of Berlin… Here you see the devastating effect of copyright on creativity…

I’d like to point out the last 2 posts i want to make on the subject (yeah it’s also for me to not forgett…):

• “The copyright war” – on the disproportionity of the “two” adversary be it in courts or in lobying work.
• Copyright in Europe, a menace for democracy? this is what motivated me in the first place to talk about copyright, i’d like to question if what we see at work in the law making process on the subject of copyright point out potential risk for democratie at european level.

Intellectual property

it’s 4:46 in the morning and i can’t sleep… So i decided i could as well write a post i was postponing since at least mid October…

Originally uploaded by PugnoM

The ones of you with which i regularly discuss politics – sometimes i feel there aren’t enough of those – knows that it’s a theme that interest me for a long time. Usually when i talk about it everybody suppose i want to talk about p2p, music and related problem. Actually i believe more and more that this is only a tiny little problem in a much bigger picture.

Traditionally intellectual property only applies to so called non-rival goods that is, goods that can be used/enjoyed by multiple people simultaneously. Intellectual property is then divided in different sections that don’t have much in common:

• copyright, which affects intellectual work such as books, movies, music, pictures, art in general, but also software;
• patent, which covers machine, goods ( composition of matter, article of manufacture), production processes;
• trademark: logos, names;
• industrial design and
• trade secret.

Originally uploaded by Majiscup – Drink for Design

I want to talk mostly about the two first. While not entirely similar there is an important difference that is easily noticeable: in the U.S. and Europe, the duration of a patent is typically of 10 to 20 years. As for copyright, in th U.S. it’s 70 years after the death of the author or if the work was a work for hire 120 year after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter, according to wikipedia. In Europe it is uniformely 70 years after death of the author, also according to wikipedia. Related to all of this is the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works which sets the minimal duration of copyright to be 50 years after the death of the author. Nobody can fail to see the humongus gap between the duration of copyright and patents…

I have no strong opinion with respect to patent, but for one thing: looking at this article from Techcrunch, where a company’s business model is to get money for not suing other companies for patent infrigement, seems totally wrong. And yes it looks llike it’s not only legal but also profitable… There seem to be a huge business around paterns that neither promote creativity nor is usefull to the general public in any way shape or form. It would be interesting to find ways to cut this business down as it costs real companies a lot, a price that is in the end taken care of by the customers.

As i am trying to shorten my posts, i will talk about copyright in a second voley of this (maybe longer) serie.

Ideas for a political blog

Parlement Europeen (Strasbourg)

Originally uploaded by PizzaDeBarr

I’m more and more concerned about the evolution of our democracy. It’s not like I believe there will be something awful that will happen anytime soon. It’s just that I am wondering how I, or any other citizen here, could use new media and possibilities to somehow make it better, one small step at a time.

thanks to 96dpi i stumbled upon this site and i was wondering if one could not push the idea further:

Create a blog (possibly with multiple authors).

For every measure that is taken either in your national parliament, or in the European parliament, that you feel you have a strong opinion on, write the delegate that is representing you an open letter that you post on that blog. In that open letter, explain the problem, if he took a stance on the problem (that is the one you also have) remind him of it. Ask him to vote in your sense for that motion/law/decision or to motivate why he will not. Ask him if you can publish that motivation, if he agrees publish it.

Then make a blog post about how the decision passed, and if the information is available, how your delegates did vote.

At the next election where he is presenting himself again, draw a balance of how much he respected his election promises. Ask him and any other candidate to take a clear stance on the matters.

The idea is to make elected persons more accountable for the decision they are taking. Do you think it would help? If yes anybody who would like to join me on such a project?

Like a Hamster

Recently as i was going to my office, i saw that the neighboring office was open. Since i had not seen Guntram for a while i decided to stop by and say hallo. This ended up being a fatal error. This evil guy,

Guntram explaining some complicated stuff (or is he just taking a pose?)

had brought some equipment with him. Unsuspecting, i started to toy around with it, quickly forgetting the time flying by… Somehow, we mathematicians are, i believe, strongly attracted to problems that look quite simple on first glance, but are actually very deep. This one was one of those and is to the mathematician what a wheel is to a hamster…

The culprit and a pretty good book