[okfn-discuss] Greek root for knowledge?

Tue Feb 5 10:12:09 UTC 2013

Hi Harry,

Given that "academic articles funded my public money should be available to
the public free of charge" (and I presume you'd say that same or similar
about data from public institutions) - what cases are you talking about
here?

Are you talking about academics who generate data about diseases in the
course of their research? (In which case are you opposed to the Panton
Principles and the Budapest Open Access Initiative 10 year recommendations?)

Or are you talking about collaborative projects like Open Street Map or
Wikipedia? (In which case would you have it they switched to a more
restrictive license?)

Or are you talking about individuals who generate photographs, blog posts,
etc? In which case isn't this to some extent less about public policy and
more about personal choice?

Personally I'd rather openly license the photographs that I upload publicly
to services like Flickr CC-BY-SA so that they can be used in projects like
Wikipedia. For these photographs I don't mind who uses them. There was even
recently a case where the French government mistakenly claimed copyright in
a photograph that I had taken [1].

If I wanted to make a living from selling my pictures as a professional
photographer, then I might consider using a different license. But there
are also nice examples of people who make a living from selling pictures
which are also freely licensed and uploaded to projects like Wikipedia [1].

There are of course broader questions about who benefits from free content
on the internet (presumably this would include providers of hardware,
people who own or control fibre optic networks, people who make chips or
control natural resources from which chips are made) - but I'm not sure
that using Getty Images or slapping click-wrap agreements on all of your
stuff is necessarily going to change this.

Generally I'd rather there were more wonderful ['ethical', co-operative,
zero carbon, etc] alternatives to all of the big commercial services that
many of us use (and I'm sure this is a common sentiment - perhaps one day
there will be[3]) - but, exploitative as some of these services might be,
I'm not sure that 'slavery' is the best way to characterise my use of
Flickr. But I agree with your sentiment that we should strive to be less
naive about things which are 'free', and who owns the services, hardware
and infrastructure upon which 'free' depends.

J.

[1] http://jonathangray.org/2012/03/08/attributive-justice/
[2] http://www.sebastiaanterburg.nl/
[3] I'm sure you're aware of things like:
http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/
http://thefnf.org/

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Harry Halpin <hhalpin at ibiblio.org> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:08 AM, Aaron Wolf <wolftune at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "I don't want some random multi-national to use my photos in an
>> advertising campaign without my permission."
>>
>> I don't want to get this off track, but this is one of the main misguided
>> ideas of NC-advocates. It would be WONDERFUL if some multi-national you
>> don't like used your CC-BY-SA photos. There is no better way for you to
>> have access and le.gal ability to do whatever you like with their ad! You
>> could criticize it and get much more press for "the photographer from that
>> ad disapproves of this business!" than for "some random person disapproves
>> of this business".
>>
>
> No. I don't want the ad to exist in the first place. I don't want some
> multi-national to make *any* money, and I don't want money made from the
> ad. Period. I don't care about press or attempting to commercialize my
> personal photos.
>
>
>>
>> Seriously, the SA is the copyleft part and it is more than adequate here.
>> Exxon doesn't want to license their ads with CC-BY-SA. They aren't going to
>> use your SA photos anyway. It would be wonderful if they did because it
>> would give you more power, but they won't. Instead, they'll make just as
>> good an ad with someone else's photo. You choosing NC does absolutely
>> nothing to stop them and their ads.
>>
>
> Any smart company such as Google realizes its a better business model to
> make people do work for free to access supposedly free content than to
> actually pay them (traditional businesses)
> or attempt to make them pay for access (so-called "creative industries")
>
>>
>> On the other hand, if you choose NC, you DO stop ME from doing completely
>> non-commercial work where I make creative educational videos using
>> Wikimedia content and other photos. I would like to use your photos maybe.
>> The NC license stops me even though I'm not doing *anything* commercial. In
>> other words, what you intend from the license is not working; the NC
>> license is failing to achieve what you want. It doesn't stop anything you
>> want to stop and it only hurts people you don't want to hurt. And it is a
>> perfect example of the sort of restriction that seems benign but actually
>> destroys the not-yet-named thing that Peter is talking about.
>>
>
> Again, wrong. I have the right to tell even non-commercial educational
> video makers to not use my data. Have  you read the WEF report "Personal
> Data as a New Asset Class"? Do you understand what "asset" means?
>
>
>> Here's my popular non-commercial video:
>> http://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.html
>> Is it good that I had to skip all sorts of nice photos when making this?
>> NC was not helpful, it made my project harder. I am grateful for all the
>> people who realized the value of sticking to just CC-BY or CC-BY-SA,
>> otherwise this project would not have been possible.
>>
>> What I'm trying to get at is this: don't just defend a license because
>> you like the intent. Licenses aren't just about intention. A well-intended
>> license can be effectively failing, and that's the case with NC. It matters
>> not that NC *sounds* like what feels right to you, it matters that it
>> doesn't do what you want. The fact that we also might disagree about
>> commercial uses and whether they are ok or not is a side issue.
>>
>>
> I was using NC as an example. Perhaps legally it needs better wording to
> define NC. However, you are missing my main point, which is the "open data
> rhetoric with no restrictions" is seriously misguided. The point is the
> communities who produce data should be able to both offer access and
> restrict the data as they see fit according to their ethical principles.
> So, academic articles funded my public money should be available to the
> public free of charge. My personal photos should not end up in either an
> advertisement or educational video without my permission. And in both
> cases, I think payment could be considered reasonable to say the least.
>
> Unless you enjoy working for free. There used to be a word for working for
> free for someone else's profit - "slavery" :) And until all consumer
> products become free of charge, it seems rather politically and
> economically naive  to demand all data be open and free to re-use while the
> rest of the non-digital world isn't.
>
> Respectfully,
>> Aaron
>>
>> --
>> Aaron Wolf
>> wolftune.com
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 7:39 PM, Harry Halpin <hhalpin at ibiblio.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Sophia is "wisdom" but also "sophists" were those that in contrast to
>>> "philosophers" who loved wisdom, simply pretended to be able to possess it
>>> and teach it. Thus, super-sophisticity could be misinterpreted. You may
>>> want to look at "noesis", which is similar to "mental acts" or
>>> "dianoeisis". Supernoesis?
>>>
>>> Although maybe super-sophistry is the right world :) For example,  I
>>> disagree with removal of non-commercial licensing from Creative Commons.
>>> Essentially by "speeding" up the production of knowledge but not allowing a
>>> copy-left like mechanism that prevents commercial exploitation without
>>> recompensation, you essentially are providing an ever-larger set of data
>>> produced by individuals and public sector bodies (both under severe strain
>>> due to the crisis) for commercial companies to exploit without any
>>> re-compensation for the actual production of such data. So, I'm happy to
>>> share my photos with a non-commercial license. I don't want some random
>>> multi-national to use my photos in an advertising campaign without my
>>> permission. In Marxist terms, that's primitive accumulation - sort of
>>> similar to the looting of Africa and other countries during the colonial
>>> period, but this time done on the level of data.  I think there's some
>>> thoroughly discredited neoliberal ideology at work in some of the "open
>>> data" rhetoric, but then most people involved in open data, while doing it
>>> for the right reasons, aren't actually thinking in terms of political
>>> economy and thus are quite naive. I think open data can change the world,
>>> but find the "removal of any barriers" deeply problematic and
>>> short-sighted. Instead, we should produce the kinds of incentive structures
>>> necessary to align with the ethics of a community, which I would prefer to
>>> be democracy and mass empowerment.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:37 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I want to create a neologism for the infinitely fast flow of knowledge
>>>> when there are no barriers and am looking for a (probably) Greek root.
>>>>
>>>> The metaphor is superconductivity and superfluidity. A superconducting
>>>> magnet can support trains, run for ever, etc. Any impedance destroys it. I
>>>> want to argue that only Open Knowledge (a la OKD) is fit for the modern age
>>>> - that licences, logins, etc completely destroy the flow of knowledge.
>>>>
>>>> So, analogous with superconductivity and superfluidity do we have a
>>>> word for knowledge?
>>>>
>>>> supersophicity? (sophos = wisdom)
>>>> supergnosis? supergnosicity? (but conflation with Christian theology)
>>>>
>>>> or ???
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> P.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Peter Murray-Rust
>>>> Reader in Molecular Informatics
>>>> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
>>>> University of Cambridge
>>>> CB2 1EW, UK
>>>> +44-1223-763069
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> okfn-discuss mailing list
>>>> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
>>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> okfn-discuss mailing list
>>> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> okfn-discuss mailing list
>> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> okfn-discuss mailing list
> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
>
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
Director of Policy and Ideas
The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> |
@okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
Support our work: okfn.org/support
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/attachments/20130205/48b0be8a/attachment.html>