A lectures and panel discussion in collaboration with http://vrijschrift.org
Date/time: February 23, from 19:00 to 22:00 o'clock
Location: Theatrum Anatomicum, Waag Society in Amsterdam
Livestream: http://connect.waag.org
reservations: reserveren@waag.org
Program:
19:00 Lecture Michael Hart "Project Gutenberg: An Effort To Give Away A Quadrillion eBooks By 2015".
20:00 Lecture Richard Stallman "The Danger of Software Patents".
21:00 Panel discussion with Richard Stallman, Michael Hart, politicians, Ruth Towse and Dirk Visser. Discussion leader is Vincent Everts. The discussion will be focussed on "Public Domain".
22:00 The end.
About the lectures
Abstract "The Danger of Software Patents"
Richard Stallman will explain how software patents obstruct software development. Software patents are patents that cover software ideas. They restrict the development of software, so that every design decision brings a risk of getting sued. Patents in other fields restrict factories, but software patents restrict every computer user. Economic research shows that they even retard progress.
Abstract "Project Gutenberg: An Effort To Give Away A Quadrillion eBooks By
2015".
Michael S. Hart will present a brief history of Project Gutenberg's efforts to bring electronic libraries to the masses via a Neo-Industrial Revolution. He will then make predictions concerning the next several decades, including eBooks, eLibraries, copyright and machine translation: including million eBook libraries one can carry with a laptop, billions of Internet users, and the future of copyright and the public domain.
About the speakers
Michael Hart
Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael S. Hart, who decided in his first day on the Internet, back in 1971, that computers would be best used to communicate the history and culture of the world freely to everyone throughout the rest of time. Since then, he has been joined by thousands of volunteers who share this vision. Today PG has published over 11.111 eBooks.
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is a central figure of the free software movement, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. He invented the concept of copyleft to protect the ideals of this movement, and enshrined this concept in the widely-used GPL software license.
Dirk Visser
Prof. dr. Dirk J.G. Visser is professor of intellectual propery law at Leiden University and attorney with Stibbe in Amsterdam.
Ruth Towse
Ruth Towse is a reader in Cultural Industries at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Her main area of expertise is in cultural economics with special reference to the economics artistslabour markets and copyright in the cultural industries. She has published widely in cultural economics and on the economics of copyright, editing several major collections in both fields as well as authoring many articles in international journals and other publications.
About streaming video
There is streaming video, so the events are broadcasted international over the net. Address will be rtsp://qt.waag.org/live_high.sdp (for 500Kbps stream) and rtsp://qt.waag.org/live_low.sdp (for 48kbps stream). Quicktime, mplayer, mp4player, realplayer all can handle the format (mp4 xvid for video and AAC for audio).
