Livestream: Freedom of Information

[elektro80]

Calendar Event: February 23, 2004

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'Freedom of Information'
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).