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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Upd-discuss] The Hipatia Manifesto
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 13:22:18 -0800
From: Seth Johnson <seth.johnson RealMeasures.dyndns.org>
Organization: Real Measures
To: a2k lists.essential.org, upd-discuss lists.essential.org


http://www.hipatia.info/


Hipatia  - Free knowledge in action for the people of the world

About Hipatia

Software without borders. Knowledge without frontiers, that is
Hipatia. We strive to have free knowledge, in action for towns
and villages of the world.

Hipatia came up as a spontaneous coordination of people from all
around the world that share a vision and a goal. And the vision
is to have a global knowledge society based on freedom, equity
and solidarity. Manifesto of Hipatia outlines this vision in
detail.

Hipatia people want to:

    * promote freedom of (and free sharing of) knowledge, as is
the right of all human beings to access, use, create, modify and
distribute knowledge freely and openly;
    * realize, favour and/or promote the sustainable diffusion of
human knowledge.

To make this goals reality hipatia people promote:

    * public policies, human and social behaviours and outlook
that favour free accessible, sustainable and sociable technology
and knowledge;
    * solidarity in the use of knowledge in the framework of an
economical and social model built on the principal of equality of
all human beings in all the countries of the world.

About Hypatia

Hypatia of Alexandria was a philosopher, mathematician, and a
great teacher who lived in Alexandria. Daughter of Theon, the
last fellow of the Library of Alexandria, Hypatia surpassed her
father in very young age. Driven by the passion for knowledge she
stood for freedom and spirit of scientific enquiry. Spreading of
knowledge was important for her. She went around the city talking
to people, discussed with other scholers, and took students from
many parts of the country.

Discovering and sharing knowledge is not something with every one
is happy about. Hypatia became victim of tyranny of such people.
She had to become martyr for freedom, freedom in all respects.

Along with the great daughter of Alexandria, Hypatia, one of the
most important centre of knowledge went into oblivion. Shortly
after tragic death of Hypatia, even the last remnants of Library
of Alexandria were destroyed. And Europe went into a 'Dark age'.
It took several hundred years and sacrifice of many men and women
to escape from that darkness.

Hipatian's bow before these great men and women whose sacrifices
brought us the freedom and development we enjoy today. We realise
that this freedom is not irreversible and it is up to each one of
us to defend this freedom. We promise to to take effort in
defence of freedom in all respect and freedom of knowledge in
particular.

---

http://www.hipatia.info/index.php?id=manifesto_en

The Hipatia Manifesto

Free knowledge, in action for the peoples of the world

We propose the creation of a world-wide, popular, democratic
organization to promote the adoption of public policies combined
with human and social behaviour that favour the free availability
and sustainability of, and social access to, technology and
knowledge; their use for the common good; and the viability of
the economic model which creates them, in terms of the equality
and inclusion of all human beings and all peoples of the world.

FREE SOFTWARE, route to a knowledge which is:

    * socially just
    * technologically sustainable
    * economically viable

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

I - Terms of Reference

Earth, water, air and fire were the elements of the classical
world. Since Einstein we have understood the world in terms of
two kinds of analysis and synthesis: the matter/energy pair, and
information.

Recent centuries have been characterized by increased control
over matter and energy, together with the capitalization,
appropriation, exploitation, and control by a minority of the
knowledge and technologies involved. In large part this
determined the economic and social structures that were created
to support those changes. Class differences, different standards
of living, and conflict created diversity and the opportunity to
carry out projects and satisfy individual desires and needs.
Modern capitalism is both consequence and motor of technological
development.

For some decades now technological innovation, and consequently
one of the main sources of accumulation of capital, has centred
on the so-called 'information technologies'.

Economic management and the forms of appropriation of the
resources generated will determine in large part the future types
of organization of human societies.

Today, as never before, technology and its material and
intellectual bases have the possibility of changing and
redefining the human being and human societies.

Concepts like the 'digital divide' show the growing concern over
the form in which these changes will affect the poorest sectors
of humanity; differences in wealth are creating both new
illiterates, and human beings who can measure up to the new
possibilities.
II - What's Coming Next

Since its beginnings in the eddies of the energy flux, life has
become ever more complex; locally decreasing entropy;
'progressing' through natural selection; maturing; including
itself in its mental models, as it gains consciousness of its
reality; and preparing itself to 'improve' as a function of its
emerging objectives.

Genetics and biotechnology will change what we are as people,
changing our biology to make us stronger, more intelligent,
allowing us choose how our children will be, altering the role of
the sexes, the concept of human reproduction, and other questions
we can now barely glimpse.

The 'information age', telecommunications and computer science
will allow us to build communication networks unimaginable today.
The interconnection of mobile phones and computers with our
neural pathways will allow things that we once believed to be
fantasy: telepathy and telekinesis, for example. Interfaces
between the human brain and computers, artefacts of all kinds,
videocameras, and other objects, will become normal. Only our
limited imagination prevents us from seeing what we could
achieve.

The growth of communication capacity, only hinted at by the
Internet, will allow future humanity to evolve towards
meta-organisms interconnecting humans. An entelechy of greater
complexity than any we know of. One or more superimposed beings
of which we are mere cells.

The telephone made possible bidirectional communication between
two points in a network: a model of communication between peers.
Television and radio allowed unidirectional communication from
one point to all other points in the network: one point
generates, while all the others consume. The Internet allows all
to all communication that is both horizontal and transparent. The
computer becomes a communications centre which superposes the
powers of telephone and television on those of processing. Each
model defines a mode of participation and institutional and human
organization which is different. The Internet has no centre, no
control, the only central body which defines protocols is elected
democratically, and every node administers its own connections.

The changes and advances in workshop productivity, re-engineering
and other administrative schemes, the mechanization of
intellectual labour, together with the destruction of some jobs
and the creation of others, are only some aspects of the changes
in progress which make up the 'Information Society'.

The need to cure and the certain possibility of improving the
quality of life of the disabled, among others, drive the public
support for the development of these technologies, while greed
for profit mobilizes huge investment funds to new ventures.

The impact which these two technologies, among others beginning
to appear, will have on the accumulation of capital, the
distribution of wealth, and concepts such as freedom, equality,
and democracy, will be profound. Biotechnology will redefine the
human being, while computer science and communication will
redefine our societies.

We make no value judgement with these predictions, nor do we
approve of them; we simply believe they are happening.
III - Intellectual Property, a mistaken concept

The concept of property has been at the centre of both the
ideologies and the economic and social struggles of mankind.

Modern capitalism needs control of knowledge, through forms which
restrict it to private capital, assign it exchange value, and
assimilate it conceptually, commercially, and legally with the
form of 'property'.

The idea that property can exist not only in the form of goods
but also of ideas, texts, inventions (patents), songs, etc.
attempts to crystallize a form devised for matter in the realm of
information; it profoundly impacts on the structure of human
societies by allowing a constant flow of resources to those who
appropriate it, building value and the accumulation of capital on
its back. On the other hand, legislation covering author's
rights, patents, trademarks, etc is usually all jumbled up
together under this vague term, even though these concepts are
actually quite different.

It is reasonable that someone who realizes an increase in human
knowledge should have rights as a result. The problem is that the
concept of property is NOT the right one; it is a clarion call
for those who believe that everything can be appropriated.

It is therefore necessary to separate out the meanings and refer
to each concept separately, as author's rights, patents,
trademarks, etc., finding suitable legislative frameworks for
each one, without thereby treating them as property.
IV - Digital Works

Today we can digitally encode almost any kind of information,
often in real time. We can represent our knowledge, whatever it
is - pictures, texts, sounds, etc - as a sequence of ones and
zeros; basically an archive where each position is 'worth' one
bit.

In times before the digitalization of information it might have
made sense to apply the legal structures that fitted
matter/energy to information, since the material basis of
information was so important for its use that it defined the
modes in which it could be managed: use, exchange, and assignment
of value.

Digitalization makes information ubiquitous, changes its
character, and allows its manipulation both en masse and in
detail in ways completely different from the traditional ones.

The application of the concept of property to digitally encoded
artefacts is completely artificial. In the first place, they are
not artefacts to be managed by book-keeping, they can be copied
without limit without losing their essence, there is no
difference between the original and the copy. Copies of printed
books can be physically differentiated, inventoried, be
individually codified; even if they have the same content they
are material objects which are perfectly identifiable in their
physical incarnation and copying them has an important cost. Just
as Quantum Mechanics found different statistical rules for
distinguishable and indistinguishable objects (fermions and
bosons), we need different laws for digital creations and
material objects.

Although you could imagine some system to provide a material
basis which blocks the making of copies and identifies each
instance of an 'archive', a system which the big music companies
are crying out for, it would be completely artificial and would
change the essence of the free communcation which characterizes
the virtual digital space created around the internet. It would
be completely irrational and anti-economic. It would have to
block the physical analysis of the reading devices and of the
secrets encoded in its software. Up to now all the attempts made
have been cracked. It is as contradictory to apply a scheme based
on matter to information, as to impose rules designed for horse
pastures on petrol stations. Digitalization is the technique that
will end by burying intellectual property and its influence on
the current economic system. Each level of technological
development is paired with an economic, social, and legal
superstructure. In the digital world intellectual property simply
lacks sense. Traditionally, if the development of knowledge was
induced it was by those in power. Armies or governments financed,
protected, and promoted it, what we would now understand as the
public sector. Although it did not always circulate freely,
knowledge was linked to the power of the state. In recent years
the growing power of private corporations has begun to take over
the creation of knowledge. We foresee that with digitalization it
will once again be managed through public money, principally in
the Universities and the Army. Works of art will once again be
managed by their creators who will be able to distribute them
themselves.
V - Programs

Programs, as both the quintessence of information and a
particular example of digitalized works, are a class to
themselves, since they represent 'live' or active information,
instructions to be executed. They make use of the physical
substrate of modern digital electronics to take one step further
on the road to automation. Just as the machines of the industrial
revolution affected material work, the machines of the
information revolution replace more and more intellectual work.

Programs, like cooking recipes, are instructions to carry out
actions. Humans program in languages like lisp, C, Basic, perl,
etc, which we can understand. A program (compiler or interpreter)
translates these instructions into a language the processor for a
particular computer understands, which is unintelligible for
humans. Proprietary programs are distributed without the
human-understandable language in which they were written, and
which remains hidden. This is why programs can contain back-doors
or serious bugs without us being able to alter them.

Since programs can act on their own, without human intervention,
once the material basis for the virtual universe has been
realized - as it already has, in the main - they can have an
existence and actions independent of any human. Although they
only 'carry out orders', the question of what they do with the
instructions is undecideable, as the theorems of Godel-Turing on
complex systems show.

Computer viruses are the most obvious incarnation of these 'forms
of digital life', although still very primitive.

The idea of some writers - Arthur Clarke, 2001 - An Odyssey in
Space, for example - that a human can transfer her
soul-mind-program to another kind of non-biological machine is
just one example of the potential of computer science.
VI - Piracy, a word for marketing

A new spectre is haunting the planet: pirates are threatening our
way of life, which appears to be more north american than ever.
These disgusting beings have created a cult of sharing, than
which there can be no greater crime in a society which idolizes
individualism and individual success.

Then name found to identify them is promising: pirates. These
violators of compact disks, assalters of floppies, photocopiers,
thieves of videos and songs destroy the property which the big
companies have accumulated with much sacrifice, paying a minimal
wage or percentage to their creators.

Since technology helps and encourages them, as the barriers to
prevent their free spread fall with the Internet, it is necessary
to invent legal barriers to create property and value where it is
not possible to establish them naturally.

Where there are no laws, they are soon invented. Only thus it is
it possible to understand why the legislators of the third world
see themselves compelled to pass laws which deliver this
artificial property, converting their peoples into hostages of
the transnationals.

The anarchists used to say that 'property is theft', and
dedicated themselves to 'expropriations'. We say that
intellectual property is a brake on progress and dedicate
ourselves to producing free software.

And please, don't let us fall into the trap, let's reserve the
word pirate for those who attack ships, raping and pillaging.
Someone who uses a program without permission may be breaking a
perverse law, but is not a pirate.
VII - The movement for free software

The battle for control of knowledge has just begun. In the area
of biotechnology, the big companies have managed to control its
development and in this field the future evolution of the forms
of capitalization and distribution of the benefits have already
been outlined. They have even managed to patent living beings. Of
course it is essential to stress the open publication of the
human genome in this document.

As for information technology, a notable struggle has begun
between free programmers united through the Internet and the
faction embodied by Microsoft, giant owner of the greater part of
the software used in the world, once the model example of the
American way of life, and now the paradigm of the monopolies.

Expensive technologies are invented, libraries developed,
technological advances in microprocessors are delayed so that
they can carry on executing old code, and so re-use precompiled
software. The only thing which ensures reusability is the source
code, yet in the name of the creation of artificial value
innumerable resources are used up.

Humanity does not need to reinvent the wheel each time it wishes
to use it; just the fact of seeing a wheel shows us how to use
one. There is no need to keep inventing program source code. If
we stop others from seeing the original human-readable source of
programs, we force everyone to repeat the mistakes and redo the
same work.

The battle of the programmers to obtain reusability of their
programs and individual recognition for each work, against the
plan of their employers, the computing industry, to close off
source code and prevent human cooperation, is an epic, lead by
the FSF starting from the work of Richard Stallman. A struggle in
which humanity found an intelligent response to the challenge
posed, the crossroads at which it found itself. Its logo, banner,
or most important reference is the GNU code. A community of
hackers spread over the width and breadth of the planet, through
a titanic labour of programming, connected by the Internet to
which they had given shape, created the programming base on which
it was possible to use computers without using proprietary
software. This meritocracy has been the main one responsible for
spreading the ethical value of cooperation in the programming
profession.

GNU/Linux, created by Linus Torvalds, is the first working
Operating System under the GPL license and represents the
crowning of years of community effort.

The freedoms proposed by the FSF, which define free software as
covered by the GPL, are the basis for the struggle which began.
Originally stated by Richard M. Stallman, they ensure the
possibility of access to the program source, and, even more
important, stop others from using the software to create non-free
derivatives.

Various strands of opinion have contributed to the understanding
and spreading of free software; we will highlight two:

    * The Open source Movement, which drives the use of free
software, in terms of the GPL, as a business tool, and represents
the utilitarian axis. Its central idea is that free software is
more useful for business purposes, and more convenient from the
economic point of view.
    * The Free Software movement, which drives the use of free
software, in terms of the GPL, to allow the programmers of the
world to share their work. Its essence is ethical and liberating.
It doesn't matter whether free software is more useful, it has to
be developed, since only free software preserves the freedoms of
programming, sharing, and using software.

There are also different positions with regard to the forms of
distribution of software, which have given rise to various
licensing models.

The Free Software Movement uses no marketing, does not appear in
adverts on TV, or radio, or in magazines. It uses the community
and education, and depends on its supporters.

We might say that the struggle of the free software movements
represents the first example among the many sectors mobilized by
the call of 'Another world is possible', usually referred to as
the antiglobalization movement, which has succeeded in its task
of offering real alternatives.
VIII - Our struggle (mission)

As with all new developments humanity must create for itself a
set of ideas and principles to interpret and use information
technology. Our task is to build a consensus and to spread the
vision we are defending.

These principles, like all those which impact on our life, are
marked by the historical struggles of humanity and countered by
the individual wishes of the powerful of the moment against the
efforts of the rest to create an egalitarian and just society.

We must consciously include a political dimension to the
struggle. We must conquer the public arena and work towards the
goal that people and public organizations, the state in
particular, work with free information. Because we believe that
free software will help to build better societies, we recognize
that its adoption is part of our struggle to build a new world.

We intend to drive the use and creation of free software, and to
make the value of the supposed intellectual property of programs
with restricted use fall. To do this, we will create similar or
better free programs, for which the purchase cost is close to
zero.

We will teach our children to share their programs and their
computer games. A child who wishes to be a programmer will want
to look inside the programs she uses, take them to pieces, and
reassemble them differently. We must not deprive her of this
game, a practice and preparation for her life.

Rather than proposing a licence model, we advocate eliminating
the need for licences, changing the law to declare the principles
defined in the GPL as universal rights. This licence is an
intelligent method to use in a world dominated by enemies, but
now we need to change the world using the intellectual base
constructed through the GPL in the old world.

Today we can think of the building of a human community, without
taxes on information, hyper-connected with free tools and without
the economic conditioning produced by capital accumulation
through the reign of the value of software intellectual works.

That is to say, we have good news: the struggle which will define
the social and economic basis of the information technology of
the world is being won by free programmers. The software
development model which E. Raymond (founder of the open source
movement) called the 'Bazaar', as opposed to the 'Cathedral', is
working. We are bit by bit replacing a culture of the importing
of licences in garish cardboard boxes with a different one of the
contracting of services by small firms. A culture of
underemployed programmers in a single global centre with a
different one of small businessmen distributed across the planet.
Think and act globally in the creation of contents; think and act
locally in the use of the contents and programs.

It is time for all of humanity to be aware of the problem and to
take part in this battle which today is restricted to virtual
communities, but which will have a deep impact on the lives of
future generations. To win it is necessary that end users turn
massively to the use of free software. Not only for technical and
economic improvements, but for social ones too. There is a clear
risk that habit, group interests, distribution chains, marketing,
and bad or biased government decisions may end by suffocating
better products and socially adequate solutions. Just as with
environmental problems, economic externalities are not always
taken into account in market decisions. We need action by
government, advocacy, and awareness. There are various states in
the world - we would emphasize in particular the efforts of the
town of Porto Alegre and the State of Rio Grande del Sur - which
are adapting their management systems to free software.

Two models confront one another, and the actions of each will
profoundly impact on our future. Various futures are possible;
our dedication will produce one of them.
IX - Hipatia - proposals and actions to carry out

We propose the creation of Hipatia as a global environment of
reflection, coordination, and action: a progressive space of
struggle to help make concrete the possibility of a better world.

We hope to bring together contributions to constitute a political
and ideological current within the free software movement, to
incorporate within this movement a concern for the future of the
peoples of the planet.

We take as our objective that all humanity may make use of what
we have discussed above, since we believe that all human beings
and the societies we make up have the right to:

   1. know intimately and completely the working of all
technology and information created by mankind, inseparable from
the right to appropriate conditions to make use of them;
   2. modify and distribute new technologies based on earlier
ones without other limits than those of the first clause;
   3. gain recognition as authors of an intellectual work and to
be able to define the forms in which it is distributed, within
the limits imposed by the first two clauses;
   4. obtain copies of any work, in its digital form, when it
exists. Nothing will impede the free flow of digital information,
beyond the limits or prices which the store in which the work is
found at any moment imposes due to material costs or
communication links;
   5. receive information which allows the technology we use to
be understood in terms of the culture and knowledge of every
human being.

To guarantee the exercise of these rights we state our promise
to:

   1. Drive forward the use of free software as an essential
medium to provide all human beings with the rights laid out
above;
   2. Work so that all human beings have free access to the
technologies and knowledge of the information age, tending to
guarantee their participation as citizens in the world of the
future.

We invite everyone of good will to support, criticise, inprove
and/or participate, in whatever way seems best to them in this
proposal.

Brasil: Mario Luiz Teza; Argentina: Diego Saravia y Juan Carlos
Gentile; Uruguay: Luis Gonzalez.

Cafe Tortoni, Buenos Aires, November 2001.

Includes suggestions from: Alejandra Garc?a, Jos? Mar?a Budassi,
y Nidia Morrell.

English translation by Graham Seaman.

---

http://www.hipatia.info/index.php?id=manifesto2_en


Second Manifesto,
claims the right to
freedom of knowledge.

Building a society where the dignity of the individual is
respected requires that knowledge can be shared in solidarity,

and demands that

Human Rights1 be respected;

in particular:

   1. the right to a free culture2
   2. the right to education3
   3. the right to free communication4

The exercise of these rights is hindered -- in the context of
knowledge societies with their new technological basis and means
of communication -- by the current legal systems of patents and
copyright.5
The growing dominance of these legal systems over Human Rights
must be limited in the public interest6, to prevent them slowing
human progress.7

We must build a sustainable knowledge society based on
solidarity.

It is therefore necessary to change the legal system to bring it
into correspondence with reality, the needs of society, and the
new usages and customs of the internet, restoring the right to
freedom of knowledge established by the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights8

This will provide the ethical principles which allow the
individual to spread his/her knowledge, to help him/herself, to
help his/her community and the whole world, with the aim of
making society ever more free, more equal, more sustainable, and
with greater solidarity.
Hipatia

    * therefore invites all to work
    * towards the goal that all institutions, private and public
bodies, and especially the governments of the world show
themselves in favour of, participate in the creation of, and
establish

a legal framework

    * which corresponds with reality, the needs of society, and
the new usages and customs of the internet
    * and which allows all to enjoy freedom of knowledge as laid
down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights


Notes

1  Established in:

   1.

      the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),
   2.

      the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (ICESCR),
   3.

      the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR)

2  Established in clause 1 and subclauses a) and b) of article 15
of ICESCR, and in clause 1 of article 27 of the UDHR

    Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural
life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in
scientific advancement and its benefits

3  Established in article 13 of the ICESCR and in article 26 of
the UDHR

    Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free,
at least in the elementary and fundamental stages ..

4  Established in clause 2 of article 19 of the ICCPR and in
article 19 of the UDHR

    Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference
and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any
media and regardless of frontiers.

5  Relations between rights

The three above-mentioned human rights: culture, education and
communication, (as with the other rights) have a value which
preempts and limits the laws which derive from the right of the
author to benefit from his creation, recognised in clause 1
subclause c of article 15 of the ICESCR and clause 2 of article
27 of the UDHR:

    Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and
material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or
artistic production of which he is the author.

The application of this right is limited by the public interest
and by its social function as reaffirmed in the documents cited
in the following note.

The rights related to knowledge do not limit other human rights,
in particular the right to privacy established in article 12 of
the UDHR. Freedom of knowledge does not compel anyone to share
information or to make it publicly available; it gives the person
with this knowledge the right to share it, not the obligation to
share it.

Freedom of knowledge allows people to exercise a kind of
solidarity which is forbidden today. By default, unless the
author says otherwise, public law today blocks the sharing of the
expression of the ideas of a third party. With freedom, unless
the source explicitly refuses to allow it, his expression of a
known idea can be shared.

The rights related to knowledge are deeply interrelated and it is
not possible to exercise them in isolation. It is not possible to
communicate without knowledge, or to know without communication
or education. Education for today's highly sophisticated society
implies access to all available knowledge, from the first levels
of schooling on, with content and abstractions appropriate to
each level. This is not possible if it cannot be shared.

6  Which is reaffirmed in:

   1. clauses 13 and 18 of the Proclamation of Teheran
(International Conference on Human Rights at Teheran on 13 May
1968);
   2. clause 1 of the 2000/7 Resolution and clauses 4, 5, 6, 7
and 8 of the 2001/21 Resolution of the Sub-Commission on Human
Rights
   3. the Declaration on the Use of Scientific and Technological
Progress in the Interests of Peace and for the Benefit of Mankind
(resolution 3384, 10 Nov. 1975)
   4. article 6 of the Declaration on the Right to Development,
adopted by General Assembly resolution 41/128 of 4 December 1986
   5. la Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural
Co-operation Proclaimed by the General Conference of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization at its
fourteenth session on 4 November 1966

7  The effects of technological change

The transition from industrial society to knowledge society
implies profound changes. The rules of exclusive appropriation
applicable to material goods do not extend to information and
knowledge, because

   1. Material goods are 'scarce' (the apple is either yours or
mine), and the economy is built on them
   2. Digitalised knowledge can be reproduced with zero marginal
cost (if I have an idea and I tell it to you, we both have the
idea), since it has become economically independent of the
material substratum which carries it and now circulates freely on
the internet

The fact that information and knowledge are no longer scarce
goods represents a step forward for humanity; to forcibly
incorporate information into the economy through laws appropriate
to physical property externalities would slow down this
beneficial advance.

Knowledge is not quantifiable, and everyone who receives an idea
has it in a form which is independant of the form it was given
in. Knowledge is free and spreads or can be transmitted. Everyone
can spread it as they wish, and in the process, it changes. In
this sense it is not necessary to agree on rights or customs
regarding a particular item of knowledge, since there is no
unique element of knowledge to which these rights can be applied.

The internet, as a free network used by people in preference to
various other closed networks that have existed, now offers new
possibilities, not only to exercise the right to knowledge but
also to teach and to learn, to give and receive information, to
communicate with others, with knowledge genuinely held in common.

The formation of virtual communities, like that of the movement
for free software - the cultural tool of the epoch, which both
created and was created by the internet, and which proves that it
is possible to create in freedom - is only the beginning of the
change which will be created by the unbounded connection of
people.

Forbidding people to share their knowledge in solidarity, because
a third party holds property rights in it, brings with it the
danger of increasing poverty with the deep inequality in access
to the new technologies which have already created the digital
divide and a new type of illiteracy.

The full development of the society of free knowledge would arise
from the full exercise of the rights listed above made possible
by the unrestricted use of all the potential of the internet.

8  The law must be changed

The legislation on copyright, on patents, and all the legal
monopolies on intellectual creations are supposed to encourage
the spread of knowledge. Technical change has resulted in systems
which used to encourage this spread now halting it. The current
legal framework, laid down in the industrial era with the aim of
encouraging the spread of information and knowledge is today an
injustifiable anachronism.

Blocking the flow of information, which occurs whenever someone
decides to freely share its expression, harms both individuals
and society, and benefits only private minority interests (which
do not necessarily coincide with those of the authors).

--

RIAA is the RISK!  Our NET is P2P!
http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc

DRM is Theft!  We are the Stakeholders!

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or
distribution of this incidentally recorded communication.
Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so
far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in
ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of
exclusive rights.

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--
|------------ Christian Siefkes ------------- christian siefkes.net -----|
|    Web: http://www.siefkes.net/     |     Jabber: hc jabber.ccc.de     |
|  Graduate School in Distributed IS:   http://www.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/gkvi/
|------------ OpenPGP Key: http://www.siefkes.net/key.txt (ID: 0x346452D8)
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea
that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public
for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with
guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing
circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is
supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or
individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of
history be stopped, or turned back.
	-- Robert Heinlein, Life-Line

________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Kontakt: projekt oekonux.de



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