nettime Holy macaroni, check that thing out
from: James Love [EMAIL PROTECTED] to: Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 12:56:39 -0400 subj: Debate over WIPO future Dave, this is pretty important, and I hope you can share this. Jamie A battle has erupted within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) over the most fundamental questions of its mission. A number of developing countries, lead by Argentina and Brazil, have tabled a proposal for a development agenda, which involves stopping work on new treaties that hike intellectual property protections, and redirecting the agency to a range of initiatives more responsive to development and concerns of WIPO critics. Officially, this is debated on September 30, 2004. Below is a copy of a Declaration on the Future of WIPO, which discusses the problems with WIPO, the proposal for a development agenda, and other reforms at WIPO. We are seeking additional signatures for this Declaration. To sign, send an email note to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] You can read about the debate in WIPO on the development agenda, see the signatures of persons who have already signed the Declaration, and review relevant WIPO documents here: http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/genevadeclaration.html This debate is not a small thing. Industry groups, governments representing right-owners, and several persons on the WIPO Secretariat are now very active in opposing the Argentina/Brazil proposals. There is much that people can do, starting with contacting your own government to find out where they stand the Development Agenda for WIPO, and share information on us and other groups working on this issue. We also need help getting more signatures for the Declaration on the Future of WIPO. The following is the text of the English version of the Declaration we are seeking signatures. Jamie Love -- Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways. * Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die; * Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion; * Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation; * Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation; * Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions; * Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom; * Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers; * Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain. At the same time, there are astoundingly promising innovations in information, medical and other essential technologies, as well as in social movements and business models. We are witnessing highly successful campaigns for access to drugs for AIDS, scientific journals, genomic information and other databases, and hundreds of innovative collaborative efforts to create public goods, including the Internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, GNU Linux and other free and open software projects, as well as distance education tools and medical research tools. Technologies such as Google now provide tens of millions with powerful tools to find information. Alternative compensation systems have been proposed to expand access and interest in cultural works, while providing both artists and consumers with efficient and fair systems for compensation. There is renewed interest in compensatory liability rules, innovation prizes, or competitive intermediators, as models for economic incentives for science and technology that can facilitate sequential follow-on innovation and avoid monopolist abuses. In 2001, the World Trade Organization (WTO) declared that member countries should promote access to medicines for all. Humanity stands at a crossroads - a fork in our moral code and a test of our ability to adapt and grow. Will we evaluate, learn and profit from the best of these new ideas and opportunities, or will we respond to the most unimaginative pleas to suppress all of this in favor of intellectually weak, ideologically rigid, and sometimes brutally unfair and inefficient policies? Much will depend upon the future direction of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a global body setting standards that regulate the production, distribution and use of knowledge. A 1967 Convention sought to encourage creative activity by establishing WIPO to promote the protection of
nettime A hacker manifesto 0
fellow nettimers, writing is always more collaborative than anyone can ever imagine. Now that A Hacker Manifesto is out in book form, i have to say that it is really nothing more than my personal filtering of ideas from nettime. So its only appropriate that it return here. But i don't want to jam people's mail boxes, so i'll release it in bits. So first, some info about the book, and then, as a first attempt to repay the gift, the first chapter, as a separate posting. thanks Ken Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book challenges the new regime of property relations with all the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos. --Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire Type hello to the nascent hacker class, McKenzie Wark's loose confederation of fixers, file sharers, inventors, shut-ins, philosophers, programmers, and pirates... The Lang College professor's ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who hack the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for granted. If we hackers-of words, computers, sound, science, etc.-organize into a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues, then the world can be ours. --Hua Hsu, Village Voice For more information on the book: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called intellectual property, gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces. Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons. -- and the book party: Harvard University Press McKenzie Wark invite you to a party to celebrate McKenzie's new book, A Hacker Manifesto. 6-8PM Thursday 21st October The Orozco Room, New School University 66 w 12th st, 7th floor with DJ Javier Feliu DRINKS, EATS BOOKS, BEATS rsvp: mw35 (at) nyu.edu # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
