| Copyright-free Sharing | 2003-12-16 09:59 5 comments |
 by Flemming FunchWired has a story about University of Maine's Still Water new media lab, which has a new project called the Pool. Which is a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts. And the interesting part is that it is a COPYRIGHT-FREE zone. "We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.Now, imagine that. Teaching sharing. Out in the open. That's wonderful. The only sad part is that anybody at all might consider that to be a somewhat provocative thing to do. That we have to stretch our minds a bit and glance over our shoulders in order to imagine a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition. I mean, OF COURSE IT IS!! Or, rather, it is the wrong way to put it. Competition is not the opposite of cooperation. They have a sort of synergy. Free copyright-free products are competing or cooperating depending on what makes the most sense. The enemy is not competion, but monopoly ownership of *anything*. Monopoly ownership of ideas and designs in particular is the enemy of cooperation, competition, sharing and freedom of choice. |