The Commoner N.11 - spring/summer 2006 Re(in)fusing the Commons
After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.
Boing Boing: Royal Society to try open access science publishing
The UK Royal Society, the oldest “learned society” in the world, will try publishing some of its journals under open access licensing.
Boing Boing: Wendy Seltzer smokes the MPAA in the Wall St Journal
My pal and former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer conducted a debate with MPPA exec Fritz Attaway in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Wendy makes mincemeat of Attaway’s arguments, which keep coming around to accusing her of wanting to commit piracy and rip off artists, which, as she explains over and over again, isn’t what she’s trying to do at all
Boing Boing: Pete Seeger tribute disc locked down with Dr0
Such irony: Bruce Springsteen recorded a tribute album for Pete Seeger, anti-property agitator and old-guard leftist. Springsteen’s label slapped a super-restrictive DRM on the disc that prevents PC playback, ripping to MP3, and lots of other freedoms that are totally in synch with the poltiical messages in Seeger’s music.
The ad collects a century-worth of fear mongering by an industry focused on legislating to protect out-dated business models, rather than adjusting to changing market opportunities:
“I forsee a marked deterioration in American music…and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue”or rather by vice”of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines…” -John Philip Sousa on the Player Piano (1906)