Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons CEO, streamed into Second Life
via SLNN.COM:
Zdravo iCommons Summit 2007 in SL
by Scarlett Qi
June 16, 2007USC ANNENBERG ISLAND - The iCommons Summit 2007 is being held June 14-17 in Dubrovnik Croatia and the University of Southern California's Annenberg Island in Second Life.
iCommons is a group created by Creative Commons with the goal of creating and collaborating with open education, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. Creative Commons encourages use of free tools that permit users to share, modify and identify the permissions and rights for each product they create.
The iCommons Summit features projects that encourage collaboration across borders and communities. Best sharing practices and issues are presented, and the effect these practices are having on cultural and knowledge domains are discussed.
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor at Oxford University, Harvard Law School, and Berkman Center for Internet and Society gave a moving keynote on the future cyberspace and our place in it.
Zittrain contends that some technology products work in an innovative and effective way, filling a real need in people. These items then become popular and knowledge of these products filters to the less-technically aware users. It is at this point that often the product is subverted in some way. Zittrain gave the example of Vista coming out with a voice enabled command set. Users could say "open file" and it would open it. The next step would be for a virus to be voice driven and command Vista to "delete all files." Zittrain jokingly imagined the argument between you and your computer about executing this deletion.
"The best way to solve the problem," Zittrain said, "is to repeat the pattern. What can we come up with that will get us a couple of years down the line and keep us afloat." Sites like Wikipedia are carved into many small, manageable sections that can be regenerated if the site has been hacked.
Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons CEO, addressed the mixed-reality crowd in Croatia and in SL. "We get respect by demanding it loudly. The work we are doing deserves this respect. The movement is about millions of people who want to create and share free knowledge, demanding the right of this freedom… to be free of an insanely outdated copyright law." [read on...]
