Voilà les slides de l’intervention de Dominique Dupagne (atoute.org) dans le cadre de mon séminaire EHESS Transdisciplinarité et numérique. J’en profite pour remercier Dominique pour la passion et la pertinence de son intervention laquelle a été particulièrement appréciée par l’assistance, constituée cette fois-ci surtout par des citoyens, des patients, des militants de la médecine collaborative.
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Korean documentary film highlights the role of social media in promoting street protests
So you miss some old-school political action. Like, you want corrupt politicians in some faraway country and students protesting in the street. Also, you dig the new futility-ridden Internet political thang. Like, you want to see badass flash mobs and a bunch of socially networked kids that just click their way through a better world.
Then you will love Shall we protest?, the documentary film about the Chotbul (“candlelight”) political rallies that paralysed the city of Seoul from May to August 2008. Written, directed and produced by South Korean mediactivists Sungmi Cho and Dongwon Jo, the film explains with great insight and passion how a small online forum of fashion victims called the SoulDresser managed to bring 1 million citizens in the streets to protest against the South Korea/US FTA (free trade agreements).
"Le gouvernement français doit oublier les droits d’auteur s'il veut éviter le pire"
De prime abord, ses résultats peuvent ne pas paraître surprenants, mais détrompez-vous. Ils représentent une petite révolution dans le contexte français.
Larry Lessig's Book on Internet Governance Turns Ten and Goes Creative Commons
Ten years ago, Lawrence Lessig published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, a groundbreaking study on Internet governance insisting that it is not through laws that governements and private powers control the Internet, but via its software architecture, i.e. the code. Today, at the close of Web 2.0, as cloud computing hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles, his message is still relevant. How many passwords and logins do we have to juggle with on a daily basis just to perform simple tasks (check emails, watch pictures, save files)? These are very small controls that certify users identity, status, location etc. and route them in one direction or another. Exit the laws regulating individual lives, the new internet governance is more comparable to cattle drive. “Bovinity” emerges as the new human condition in technologically-enhanced times.
A fundamental principle of bovinity is operating here and elsewhere. Tiny controls, consistently enforced, are enough to direct very large animals. The controls of a certificate-rich Internet are tiny, I agree. But we are large animals. I think it is as likely that the majority of people would resist these small but efficient regulators of the Net as it is that cows would resist wire fences. This is who we are, and this is why these regulations work. (Lessig, p. 73)
Despite its far-sightedness, after ten years in print and ten years of changes in law and technology, the book needed an update. In 2005, a wiki was created to this purpose. The resulting new version of the book, Code Version 2.0, is now online under Creative Commons licence. This means you can download the new edition for free just clicking here.
In 2009 the
Support Prof. Horacio Potel!, or a portrait of the philosopher as a pirate
Addendum, Nov 14, 2009: As of today, we salute the recent decision of the Argentinian court dropping the charges against Prof Potel. Read more about this here (in English). Download court’s sentence here (in Spanish).
Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge
By the CopySouth Research Group
A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel, is facing criminal charges for maintaining a website devoted to translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright infringement. Here is Professor Potel’s sad story.
Prof. Potel usually puts his pirate patch on *before* lecturing in philosophy at UNLA
“I was fascinated at the unlimited possibilities offered by the internet for knowledge exchange”, explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set up a personal website to collect essays and other works of some well-known philosophers, starting with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Potel’s websites – Nietzsche in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish, and Derrida in Spanish – eventually developed into growing online libraries of freely downloadable philosophical texts. Nietzsche in Spanish alone has already received more than four million visitors.
Signez le Pacte des Libertés Numériques contre la Hadopi
(Pour un complément d’information, lisez ce billet (eng))
Vous avez déjà échangé des œuvres? Vous avez déjà téléchargé des films, des tubes, mais aussi des œuvres rares, oubliées ou tombées dans le domaine public? Si tel est le cas, la loi Hadopi va bientôt faire de vous un PIRATE.
Mais si, comme nous, et comme des millions d’autres citoyens en France, vous pensez qu’il est grand temps de reconnaître ces pratiques d’échange comme inscrites dans la révolution numérique, si vous partagez la conviction qu’Internet nous offre de nouveaux espaces de liberté, et qu’il faut les protéger, nous vous invitons à découvrir et signer le Pacte pour les Libertés numériques en cliquant ici : http://reseaudespirates.net/
Pourquoi signer dès aujourd’hui et rejoindre la communauté des pirates? Parce que, dans moins de 4 jours, le débat sur la loi Création & Internet (Hadopi) reprend à l’Assemblée. Le Pacte totalise à ce jour 8000 signatures. Nous pouvons faire mieux, et atteindre 100 000 signataires dans le week-end! Cliquez ici : http://reseaudespirates.net/?q=/user/register
Au delà de l’actualité de la loi Hadopi, l’ambition du Pacte est de faire des libertés numériques un élément clé de la campagne des élections européennes de juin prochain… et, plus largement, du débat public, comme Nicolas Hulot l’avait fait pour l’écologie.
Défendons les libertés numériques : prenez le parti des pirates! http://reseaudespirates.net/?q=/user/register
Le réseau des pirates
Ils nous soutiennent : Lepost.fr, Numerama, L’hebdomadaire Vendredi, Agoravox.
Et de nombreux signataires, visibles sur le site.
March 28th 2008 is Download day: Opposition to French anti-piracy law rises
I dream of a cultural market that includes its customers, instead of suing them.
So far, I have published a couple of books and a certain amount of articles and book chapters: a fair share of them have been put online for readers to download them for free. I didn’t do it, “pirates” did. Well, sometimes Google Books did it, but pirates benefited from it, I guess… Point is: I thank them, because that helped my books being republished and made my articles known to a wider audience.
Just my two cents, but I believe people who freely download online contents are not stealing it. On the contrary, by sharing it within their communities, they are actively adding value to the creative process. I write books. Readers read it. So-called Internet pirates promote, distribute, link, localise, remix, comment and catalogue them. That’s a heck of a job. A job they are not paid for. Ironically, they pay for sharing: they pay hardware and they contribute their time, their disk space and their technical competences.
Given that, I’m all the more insulted by the anti-piracy bill recently proposed by French Minister for Culture and Communication, Christine Albanel.
Should this law pass, Internet users caught “illegally” sharing contents would have their Internet access cut out for one year (plus face fines and other legal ramifications). Backed by record industry and cinema lobbies, this law is not only politically reactionary – it is technically unfeasible. If only French lawmakers had heard about public internet access, wi-fi, cybercafés, cloud computing – they would know “individual” Internet access is just about as individual as the wall socket one plugs a washing machine in. You bar it off, I can simply go somewhere else.
Consumer associations and Internet access providers have produced a number of other compelling arguments against this law. My only argument is:
Present legislation on so-called intellectual property protection on the Web mimics past century’s legislation on private property. Users downloading mp3, films, software are equated to petty thieves stealing apples, cars, money. But a car and an mp3 file are not the same kind of product. Technically, the former is a rivalrous good, while the latter is a non-rivalrous one. If I’m driving a car, nobody else can at the same time. If I listen to an mp3, anybody else can at that same time. In the first case, we can talk about stealing. In the second case, we should talk about sharing. From a legal and economic point of view, online contents are more similar to public goods than to private ones. Downloading online contents is nothing like driving a car: it is more like riding a bus. The French government is doing something as ridiculous as forbidding public transportation.
This is why I invite you to take part to the Download day that will take place all around France on Sat, March 28th, 2009. The rationale is explained here, and here is the twitter providing directions and details about the venues.
—a