The Sun BabelFish Blog

Wizards of OS4 Videos

The Wizards of Open Source conference in Berlin is now available in ogg and mp4 formats. All talks and questions were in English. If you were not lucky enough to be in Berlin, you can follow these at your leasure from around the world.

Here is a summary of some of the talks I attended:

• Netlabels: Niche, Long Tail, Blueprint?: some very interesting talks on Netlabels, with a lot of good pointers.
• Art and Copyright: with an excellent number of talks on Appropriation Art, both from classical musicians, and the fast growing Canadian movement of the same name.
• Information Freedom Rules: Thursday's Keynote, with three very good talks on the business principles behind Open Source.
• Open Source Biotechnology: How does open source apply to biotechnology? Clearly this area is a lot more complicated, given the ethical and political issues involved. Some very good suggestions were made on how we should restructure medical research to allign the incentives to help the poorest countries in the world. Those countries have no money, so current medical research's purely profit oriented goals only produces medicine to help the healthiest people in the world solve their relatively minor problems.
• Quality Management in Free Content: Where the wikipedia fork was first announced. A good discussion ensued between Larry Sanger and Martin Haase.
• Business and the Commons: some excellent descriptions of how music sharing is creating culture in developing nations. Whereas Sony only published 15 albums from Brazil, Pop stars that fly around in Jets, bypass the oligopolistic media companies by letting their music be shared freely, produced tens of thousands of records. Two more european ideas on how to make money with free music, and what the new role of intermediaries is turning into: helping us filter the huge pool of available content.
• The Read-Write society: Lawrence Lessig's Keynote. Need I say more?
• Paris Accords: Composers, Performers and the Public: Where Peter Jenner makes his prediction that the music industry is dead if it does not make a fundamental switch and embrace the Peer to Peer way of the internet. The French intervention was too strongly republican/revolutionary and not very clear, but otherwise the talks are all very insightful.
• The EU copyright Directive, Review and implementation: is a must see for Europeans who want to get an idea of the slowness of the European process, how it tends to achieve the opposite of what is desired, and its undemocratic impact on nations that wish to join.

Posted at 01:58PM Sep 19, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General  |  Comments[0]