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[News] Free Software and Knowledge Advocated in FKFT

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FKFT - Free knowledge with SELF

,----[ Quote ] 
| During an intensive three day period, participants from the Phillipines, 
| Mexico, Tanzania, USA, and many other countries around the world, not 
| excluding Spain itself, gathered around the Free Knowledge, Free Technology 
| conference in Barcelona. The conference, organised by the SELF Project, 
| focused on the production and sharing of free educational and training 
| materials about the concept of Free Software.      
`----

http://selfproject.eu/en/FKFT/free_knowledge_with_SELF

Of shared knowledge:

Wikis Within the Enterprise: Serious Collaboration

,----[ Quote ]
| Wikis began as free, open, public spaces for anyone at all to contribute and 
| share their knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Businesses have begun to 
| recognize, however, the power of the wiki model for accomplishing internal 
| collaborative tasks, like revising HR documents, producing specifications, 
| and communicating across time and space.    
`----

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/64393.html?wlc=1220776115


Recent:

Is Stiglitz the official economist of open source?

,----[ Quote ]
| Why is he the official economist of open source? Because his main point 
| supports the open source thesis, which is that breaking monopolies on 
| information is essential for free trade and economic growth.  
`----

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2348


Free Knowledge, Free Technology

,----[ Quote ]
| The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first 
| international event which will centre on the production and sharing of 
| educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open 
| Standards. With the objective of promoting Free Software and the sharing of 
| free knowledge, the FKFT 2008 Conference will bring together hundreds of 
| people from different continents including government representatives, school 
| and university teachers, IT companies, publishers, and NGO's. By gathering 
| together people from all these groups, we aim to stimulate both present and 
| future collaboration between diverse disciplines, sectors and countries, 
| through the medium of free software programs and the sharing of successful 
| experiences related to free software and free technologies.           
`----

http://fkft.eu/


Good stuff, shame about the bad press

,----[ Quote ]
| These opinions are almost certainly not shared by the wider community of 
| consumers, businesses, economists, legislators, and policy-shapers. At the 
| highest level, there are those who no longer believe that all property is 
| theft but appear to make an exception for IP. Since every newly created work 
| builds upon the words, the thoughts, the ideas, and the knowledge created by 
| countless others in their furtherance of humanity, any attempt to ring-fence 
| an item of IP, and exclude others from it is an attempt to misappropriate 
| part of the common intellectual heritage of mankind. Since knowledge and 
| information can be shared with others without depriving oneself of them, 
| there is no loss to oneself if such an act of sharing takes place.         
| 
| At a lower level, there are those who accept the existence of IP rights, but 
| reserve their criticisms and their hostility for specific manifestations of 
| it: the enforcement of copyright against large-scale private copyists, the 
| use of trade mark rights to carve up markets so that genuine goods cannot be 
| imported from a country where they are sold cheaply for resale in another 
| country where they fetch a better price; the theft of traditional knowledge 
| and culture which is then repackaged as copyright- or patent-protected 
| property; the patrolling of industry by unproductive patent trolls, intent 
| upon securing a rent where they create no value; death by patent monopoly for 
| millions in the developing world who, in the unlikely event that they can 
| even access vital medicines, cannot afford them. To the IP professional and 
| his clients, this list can appear depressingly endless.           
| 
| [...]
| 
| This study makes one thing quite clear: attitudes toward IP rights focus 
| principally upon their negative qualities and do not connect them with that 
| which is positive. Thus, new medicines save lives, while patents kill; music 
| is cool, while copyright is a clamp; brands are brilliant, while trade marks 
| are tools of trade manipulation. It is too much to hope that the public at 
| large will wake up one morning, enlightened at the beneficial, positive, and 
| above all necessary role played by IP rights, but we can at least aspire to 
| teach that, between that which they praise and that which they condemn, there 
| is a powerful causative connection.        
`----

http://jiplp.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/5/273
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