[kictanet] Free Culture (was Re: eBay hit with £30m fine for sales of fake luxuries)

[Brian Longwe]

Hi all,

I've made a small change in the subject because now we are talking about
much more than just Ebay and looking at *Principles*, *values* and a number
of other intangibles (yes, Alex including Intellectual Property).

In 1999, David Pogue said:
"Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't
affect people who aren't onlin (and on a tiny minority of the world
population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always
flip off the modem.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig - another renown author - challenges this point of
view and asserts that today the battles that rage online dearly affect
"people who aren't online". He says that there is no swith that will
insulate us from the Internet's effect.

He then proceeds to elaborate on what he calls a "Free Culture" and I quote:

...we come from a tradition of 'free culture' .... A free culture supports
and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting
intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the
reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators
remain *as free* *as possible* from the control of the past. A free culture
is not a culture without property.it is not a culture in which artists don't
get paid...a free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It
is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the
state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes
feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property
rights that define it.

In my view, the incidents and circumstances surrounding the ebay saga are
evidence that extremism is beginning to show, and that those who can afford
it are manipulating the 'system' to protect themselves and their property
regardless of the fact/extent that they are infringing on the rights of the
*individual consumer* - who is largely innocent.

Regards,

Brian

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Alex Gakuru <alex.gakuru at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> --- On Mon, 7/7/08, Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe at gmail.com>
>
> > So, I still come back to my earlier point. If I want to
> > sell my Toyota
> > AE-100 - I have a right to 'identify' it using the
> > brand (though the
> > brand does not in itself belong to me) - but I have a
> > 'transient'
> > ownership as far as it relates to 'my' toyota.
> > People even refer to it
> > as Bryo's toyota. Of course once it is sold, it now
> > belongs to someone
> > else.
> >
>
> July 7, 2008. Intellectual Property Regime Stifles Science and Innovation,
> Nobel Laureates Say
>
> By Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch MANCHESTER, UK - The
> basic framework of the intellectual property (IP) regime aims to "close down
> access to knowledge" rather than allowing its dissemination, Professor
> Joseph Stiglitz said at a 5 July lecture on "Who Owns Science?" Stiglitz, a
> 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Professor John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel
> Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, launched Manchester University's new
> Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation. Both were highly critical of
> today's patent system, saying it stifles science and innovation.
>
> Link to the article: <http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1129>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Brian Munyao Longwe
e-mail: blongwe at gmail.com
cell: + 254 722 518 744
blog : http://zinjlog.blogspot.com
meta-blog: http://mashilingi.blogspot.com
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