Talk Tonight to Cambridge University Pugwash Society
October 25th, 2005
Tonight I’ll be talking at a joint meeting of the Cambridge University Pugwash Society and Cambridge People and Planet with the title ‘Information wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains’- Fighting for Open Knowledge in an Age of Enclosure. Anyone can come along so if you are in the area do come along (full details below).
Where and When
When: Tuesday 25th of October at 7.00pm
Where: Lounge in the Graduate Union. See The Graduate Union, Mill Lane
More Details
Did you know that:
Copyright lasts on average for more than 90 years and that the majority of the works in copyright aren’t available commercially in any form.
Millions of people in underdeveloped countries do not have access to life-saving drugs because patents make them prohibitively expensive.
Most academic journals are the work of publicly-funded scholars but their content is privately owned and often rationed out at prohibitive cost.
Restrictive digital rights managment systems lock down knowledge and pose one of the greatest threats to free/open source software
As we move into a digital age the lines are blurring between information and software. The methods of open collaboration pioneered by the free/open source software movements provide a model for the information revolution, as well as the tools to bring it about.
But for every promise of open knowledge that technology offers there is a corresponding threat, often from large interests who wish to see knowledge ‘enclosed’ and proprietized. So far those seeking enclosure have dominated - with the disastrous consequences and great costs outlined above. If we are prevent this in the future and take advantage of the vast potential technology offers we must take a stand for open knowledge.
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- Talk at Law 2.0: Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing Yesterday I was at the SCL’s
- Peter Suber and Benjamin Mako Hill Join the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board The Open Knowledge Foundation is delight
- Talk at ETech 06 Today Jo and I did our talk at ETech abo
- 8.4 Million Grant to University of Manchester to Expand Semi-Open Data Repository According to a press release yesterday t
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June 7th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
[...] Yesterday I went along to hear Tim Hubbard speak at the Cambridge University Pugwash Society on New economic models for biomedical R&D to address the worldwide problem of access to medicines. Tim’s an excellent presenter and this talk did a great job of explaining a complex issue to an unfamiliar audience (I remember my own talk over a year ago there on similar topics ago. Tim mainly focused on explaining the benefits of something like the Medical Innovation Convention — a global treaty for medical R&D that was developed by Tim and Jamie Love and is now part of the wider access to knowledge (a2k) agenda. [...]