Technology

Dutch Municipality Wants To Ban Hacker Gathering

What the Hack

The organisers of 'What the Hack', the 2005 edition of a series of
famous Dutch outdoor hacker conferences, were told that their conference
will not receive the municipal permit needed for the event to happen.


'What the Hack" is planned to take place on a large event-campground in
Liempde, between the 28th and 31st of July 2005.
About 3.000 participants from all over the world are expected. 'What The
Hack' is appealing the decision.



Autonomia Pirata/ Me...

A Week Against the Intellectual Property industries


The international boycott of the media industry begins tomorrow April 24th and continues until the 30th. The event is being promoted by p2p software developers and their business interests (who have borne the brunt of the industry assault) but supported by many consumer and user groups.

"Corporate Conquest, Global Geopolitics:

Intellectual Property Rights and Bilateral Investment Treaties"

Aziz Choudry, Seedling, January 2005

Since the breakdown of World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun in September 2003, there has been much talk of the rise of bilateralism. But bilateral trade and investment agreements aren’t so much replacing the multilateral agreements that have foreshadowed them in the last decade as working with them to create a ratcheting system to increase the levels of intellectual property protection worldwide. Interestingly, and perhaps more significantly, bilateral trade and investment agreements are also proving to be quite effective in pushing the foreign policy goals of the US and EU.

hydrarchist writes:

What The Hack? Festival
July 28-31, 2005, Den Bosch, Netherlands


What The Hack?, a large hacker's festival, has been organized as part of a interesting series of
events held every four years in The Netherlands. The events are known as a
great opportunity to meet others working on the same things. It started
with "The Galactic Hacker Party", also known as the "International
Conference on the Alternative use of Technology, Amsterdam". Since then
the festival moved outdoors, and the next three editions were held on a
large field. The last edition was visited by nearly 3000 people. Hackers
enjoy exploring the details and capabilities of tech-systems or engage
with technology on the basis of a do-it- yourself philosophy. Contrary to
popular misconception hackers do not, by definition, break into systems.

The festival will be taking place between July 28th and 31th July, 2005
in a camp near Den Bosch, The Netherlands. Common themes are freedom of
speech, government transparency, computer insecurity, privacy, open
software, open standards & software patents and community networking.

hydrarchist writes "Glyn Moody is also the author of a very good book about the history of the free software movement"Rebel Code..

Second sight


Glynn Moody


Thursday March 10, 2005


The Guardian

If you think computer patent law is boring, think again. Over the
past year, factions for and against the patenting of programs
have fought a battle for the soul of European software, and the
ramifications of a recent EU decision on the subject are likely
to be huge - and not just for anoraks.

Mara Kaufman writes

"A Hacker's Perspective on the Social Forums"
Mara Kaufman



Of the 155,000 people at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre this January, some were chosen by their communities to represent them. Some were sent by their organizations. Some were delegated by their constituencies. But many of us were there because we could be — paid activists, paid students, and people who can afford to take a week off of work in the middle of January. This is a key issue for the forum phenomenon: anybody can go, but going so far rests largely on a kind of privileged volunteerism.

"Hack License"

Simson Garfinkel

Reviewing:

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

As cultural critic and New School University professor McKenzie Wark
sees things, today's battles over copyrights, trademarks, and patents
are simply the next phase in the age-old battle between the productive
classes and the ruling classes that strive to turn those producers
into subjects. But whereas Marx and Engels saw the battle of
capitalist society as being between two social classes — the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie — Wark sees one between two newly emergent classes:
the hackers and a new group that Wark has added to the lexicon of the
academy: the "vectoralist class."

Update

Following the removal of the tracker and vtorrent files (subsequent to a threat by lawyers for the film production company), several other torrent trackerts are now carrying the Eyes on the Prize. Here is one hosting the first three episodes.

This from Cory Dottow's Boing-Boing.


Eyes on the Screen: Direct action to save Eyes on the Prize

Eyes on the Prize is a seminal documentary about the US civil rights movement, a classic that is shown and re-shown every year around this time, for Black History Month. The problem (see earlier BB post) is that the archival footage in Eyes on the Prize was only cleared for the initial production, and the cost of clearing the copyrights again is prohibitive. It seems, then, that this documentary is doomed to vanish, once the existing VHS copies wear out.


Peer-to-Peer A general call to all P2P-users


As of late the MPAA's and RIAA's of the world are claiming that we are robbing them of their rightly earned money and are trying to find ways to legally put and end to it. The scare tactics have been fruitful, it would seem as they keep getting settlements out of court and probably make a profit out of it.

This campaign of theirs, of course, isn't to target and eradicate filesharing as much as an attempt to control the market and where our money goes. Most of us feel that they should very well look into availability and affordable prices instead of claiming higher moral ground. The wealthiest nowadays decide what we shall listen to and watch, using staggering PR campaigns, and most releases are "format" productions, where talent and creativity comes second only to business concept and money.

Read the rest at Infoanarchy.org"

The following article is from exquisite magazine, Mute. Check it out.

Commercial Commons

by researchers at the Economic Observatory of the University of Openess


Creative Commons advertise their licenses as the best-of-both-worlds between copyright and the public domain. But is the word 'commons' then a misnomer, and can such licensing be subjected to the same abuse as copyright? Saul Albert raises the question and a discussion within the University of Openess Wiki follows

The Creative Commons licenses have become a kind of default orthodoxy in non-commercial licensing. Every unpunctuated half-sentence spilled into a weblog, every petulant rant published by 'Free Culture' pundits, every square millimetre of Lawrence Lessig's abundant intellectual property is immediately and righteously staked out as part of the great wealth of man's 'Creative Commons'.

Read the rest of the article"

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