Wizards of OS 3 - The Future of the Digital Commons
06/06/2004
International Conference
June 10 - 12, 2004
Berlin Congress Center
INVITATION TO THE PRESS CONFERENCE
More than 100 scientists, programmers, artists and activists from 23 countries will present vital examples of the work being carried out for our collective Digital Commons starting this coming Thursday at the Wizards of OS 3 conference. They will also naturally be considering and planning for the future of this Digital Commons. Thomas Krueger, head of the Federal Office for Political Education, will deliver the WOS 3 opening address.
At the press conference on June 10 at 10 am in the Berlin Congress Center (Room C04), Volker Grassmuck, WOS director, Christiane Asschenfeldt, director of Creative Commons Germany and of the iCommons Project, Eben Moglen, author of the GNU General Public License, and Atul Chitnis, GNU/Linux pioneer and organizer of the largest conference for free software in India, will be available to answer questions.
'Free'does not mean 'without cost'. That's a message that not only free software evangelists are trying to get across. WOS 3 will put forward for discussion a model that incorporates free use of music and other content while also allowing for compensation of the artists. The principle has been honored in Germany and many other countries for 40 years: Copyright allows for private copies and compensates copyright holders and publishers via flat-rate fees for copying devices and blank media. A flat-rate for music, added onto Internet access fees, for example, would allow for legal file- sharing while, at the same time, offering fair compensation to artists. William Fisher, Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard University, and Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will present a legal and voluntary variation of this model. At WOS 3, a call to EU lawmakers will be formulated, requesting that the music flat-rate be incorporated into the ongoing reform of collection agencies (Panel: Alternative Compensation Systems, June 12, 1 pm; Workshop: 3 pm).
Freedom not only has to be economically feasible, it has to be able to defend itself. For almost 20 years now, the GNU General Public License (GPL) has ensured that free software remains just that - and that it does not become privatized. For the first time, a court of law has upheld the legality of the GPL. Harald Welte of the Netfilter Team will report on the restraining order he won in April in Munich against the Dutch company Sitecom, a company that had used his GPL-licensed software without making its source code public (Panel: Copyright, June 10, 5 pm).
Christoph Hellwig has also been able to score an important victory in the defense of GNU/Linux from attacks by SCO. The German software developer had also worked for Caldera, the predecessor to SCO, and had contributed significantly to the current Linux core. At WOS 3, Hellwig, will speak about his ideas for quality management as it applies to free software (Panel: Free Software & Quality Management, June 12, 5 pm).
WOS 3 is funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Applications for press accreditation may be found here: http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=832
