[wsfii-discuss] Royal Society IP Charter

[Saul Albert]

Hi Paul,

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 09:30:05AM +0100, Paul Sanders wrote:
> "Human rights call on us to ensure that everyone can create, access,  
> use and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals,  
> communities and societies to achieve their full potential."

I went to the launch event at the RSA last Thursday. It was pretty
interesting, there were some very well-heeled people there :)

The most amazing bit was the flash animation they'd developed, in a kind
of bizarre, British unintentional pastiche of the Creative Commons 'get
creative' animation http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/ we
all know and erm.. love. I'd love to be able to link to it, but I
strongly suspect they'll never release it. It's basically a female voice
reading the charter, slowly, accompanied by a eye-watering animations of
the words she reads, pointlessly spinning and fluttering across the
screen. I heard quite a few people giggling during that bit.

The talks were interesting - James 'Christmas is Communism!' Boyle was
particularly great. And the other speakers were distinguished and kind of
relevant I suppose. The overall message they were giving, which, as Boyle
admitted, was far from radical, was that in each emergent domain of
intellectual property there should be evidence that giving greater rights
to owners is an effective market catalyst before those rights are
granted. I should add that this was qualified by lots of talk about the
rights of the individual balanced against the needs of society etc..

Rufus pointed out that the free market fundamentalists would be upset by
the charter because it basically states that the market is part of
society, rather than vice versa. I'm not sure it really admitted that.

Overall, It was really interesting to see the transition from the
pragmatically focused set of agendas at WSFII, through the
science/technology/artistic/commercial layer of activity at the Future
Wireless event - http://www.cybersalon.org/future_wireless/ , and the
artistic / theoretical discussions about freedom, collaboration and
openness at the Tate during opencongress - http://opencongress.omweb.org.  

The Charter launch wasn't the first bit of high-political drama either. A
fruther transition to that level of British cultural establishment was
the rousing rhetorical talk Gilberto Gil gave at http://guanabara.co.uk/
a few days before, at which the press had a briefing and opportunity to
interview the celebrities. I saw some of the same journalists at the RSA
launch - probably doing the serious bit of the story they started after
watching Gil get up and trot out some classic tunes after his speech.

In the end it was hard to recognise the thread running through these
events - although I'd been helping with all but the last (the Adelphi)
one through nodel.org - the group I've been working with on trying to
bring all this stuff together. 

I think the Adelphi charter is admirable, and it's a great outcome in
some ways. More encouraging to me as an overall outcome was the fact that
the grassroots activities as well as the more talky talky levels of
political involvement manifested a whole lot of activity this October,
which at least means people were meeting and talking.

However, I think the thread that links WSFII with the Adelphi charter got
lost at some point between the cybersalon and opencongress events. I
think what went missing was the need to *go and do stuff* without asking
permission from lawyers.

At the end of the talks, I asked the question 

'why is there nothing about Internet governance or infrastructure in this
charter, what's the point of having an equitable balance of rights
between consumers and producers, if the media of transmission are
completely captive and enclosed?'

Nobody really wanted to answer that one.

X

Saul.