P2P Foundation

Source: TorrentFreak

A few moments ago Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This means that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström will stand.

November 2010, the Swedish Court of Appeal found three people behind The Pirate Bay guilty of criminal copyright infringement offenses.

Although Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström all had their prison sentences decreased from the levels ordered at their original 2009 trial, they were ordered to pay increased damages amounting to millions of dollars to the entertainment company plaintiffs.

Hoping to overturn the ruling, the three filed for a hearing of their case at the Supreme Court. Today this request was denied, meaning that the sentences as determined by the Court of Appeal are now final.

Peter Sunde, also known as Brokep, now awaits 8 months in prison. Fredrik Neij, also known as TiAMO, faces 10 months. Businessman Carl Lundström has the lightest sentence of 4 months. All will have to pay their share of a combined 46 million kronor ($6.8 million) in damages.

A fourth defendant, Pirate Bay… Continue reading »

This cultural creation model is worth looking at:

How it works

“By becoming a member of hitRECord.org you agree to the following main principles:

1. The RECords you upload are 100% original to you.

2. You grant every user on hitRECord.org the right to remix your RECords.

3. You grant hitRECord.org the non-exclusive right to monetize your RECords, sharing what we make after costs with contributors 50-50.

The HITRECORD ACCORD / TERMS OF SERVICE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

While you MUST read our TERMS OF SERVICE and TERMS FOR SELECTING RECORDS FOR MONETIZED PRODUCTIONS in their entirety, below are answers to a few frequently asked questions. If you’d like to submit questions that aren’t covered below, please direct them here

Q: WHAT KINDS OF RECORDS AM I ALLOWED TO CONTRIBUTE TO HITRECORD.ORG?

A: You may upload all types of RECords – video, audio, text, pictures – provided they belong to you, are 100% original and they do not contain anyone else’s work that you don’t have the right to distribute.

Q: AM I ALLOWED TO DOWNLOAD OTHERS’ WORK FROM HITRECORD.ORG, MODIFY IT and RE-UPLOAD IT TO HITRECORD.ORG?

A: Yes! That’s the point. Once you reupload your work, you must give the original User attribution. On hitRECord.org, we call… Continue reading »

* Article: Beyond Left and Right: Peer-to-Peer themes and urban priorities for the self-organizing society. Nikos A. Salingaros. University of Texas at San Antonio.

Nikos Salingaros:

Introduction.

“I would like to respond to Michel Bauwens’ article published on 3 April 2010, which examines the nature of a broad alliance that could be expected to adopt a new P2P (Peer-to-Peer) worldview. Bauwens correctly questions whether the old Left/Right divide is still valid. It probably is, but it is certainly neither the only nor the predominant divisor of society into groups with opposing worldviews. I have been exploring contrasting viewpoints from the perspective of art, architecture, and urbanism for some time, and would like to suggest a view of contemporary problems. This approach may hopefully yield insights that could be exploited in moving towards a more humanly-adaptive P2P society.

What I have learned from Bauwens is that the political/economic spectrum consists of a myriad of contrasting approaches, and that any simplistic interpretation is not only wrong but also dangerous. While a transparently simple interpretation and model is logically attractive, especially to the scientifically-minded reader, such approaches have led to drastic errors in the past. Examples are numerous. Peer-to-peer orientations are being debated on both sides… Continue reading »

Source: Dave Thier

The internet may have been very quick to rest on its laurels after the successful opposition to SOPA. First there was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, a highly restrictive, multi-national law that looked a lot like SOPA and covered everything from music downloads to crops. That bill saw much of the same opposition that SOPA, and eventually saw some its most controversial provisions watered down in the final draft.

But there doesn’t seem to be any end: now, the fight over piracy on the internet moves East. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is the newest legislation being fought over in the increasingly heated war for the internet. It’s being negotiated in nine-country talks that include the U.S., Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Peru, Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore.

It’s a familiar story: supporters say that intellectual property provisions are necessary to fight piracy, and critics are calling them draconian, over-reaching and oppressive. And like ACTA, critics are decrying TPP for being negotiated behind closed doors — on Wednesday, negotiators met in a Hollywood restaurant veiled in secrecy. At Ars Technica, Nate Anderson writes about American University Professor Sean Flynn, who claims that a hotel near the negotiations had been explicitly asked… Continue reading »

Excerpted from Bill McKibben:

“When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be,… Continue reading »

Michel asked me to search in the Italian part of the Internet interesting quotes from, or comments about, Ugo Mattei and his work and thoughts about the Commons.

I’m surely not expert enough to answer such a request in the best way. This said, what I found more interesting among Mattei’s recent writings or interviews available online in Italian, is what he wrote about corporate personhood in Europa, occupiamo lo spazio comune (Europe, let’s occupy the common spaces). Here are some quotes from that piece that summarize (I hope!) his point of view:

The political outcomes of the process of European integration have been characterized by the gradual transfer of power in places farther away from the people, leading to dispossession of participatory democracy. It’s not too early to say that Europe has given and keeps giving a very strong ideological and political contribution to the transformation of citizens into consumers which results in passivity, consumerism, isolation and participation in the dominant rhetoric.

, Europe has structured itself as an order based on the protection of private property as a fundamental right to the unlimited accumulation of finite resources, both for individuals and (which is much more… Continue reading »

Source: BoingBoing

Michael Geist sez, “I’ve posted a video version of a recent talk on SOPA activism and what it means for the next generation of global copyright agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The talk is about an hour as it also assesses the global strategies employed by the U.S. and copyright lobby groups of shifting away from WIPO toward closed negotiations (like ACTA) and domestic copyright pressure (like the Canada’s Bill C-11, which is a combination of DMCA + potentially SOPA).”

Charles Eistenstein discusses the practice of gift circles:

“Given the cir­cu­lar na­ture of gift flow, I was ex­cited to learn that one of the most promis­ing so­cial in­ven­tions that I’ve come across for build­ing com­mu­nity is called the Gift Cir­cle. De­vel­oped by Alpha Lo, co-au­thor of The Open Col­lab­o­ra­tion En­cy­clo­pe­dia, and his friends in Marin County, Cal­i­for­nia, it ex­em­pli­fies the dy­nam­ics of gift sys­tems and il­lu­mi­nates the broad ram­i­fi­ca­tions that gift economies por­tend for our econ­omy, psy­chol­ogy, and civ­i­liza­tion.

The ideal num­ber of par­tic­i­pants in a gift cir­cle is 10-20. Every­one sits in a cir­cle, and takes turns say­ing one or two needs they have. In the last cir­cle I fa­cil­i­tated, some of the needs shared were: “a ride to the air­port next week,” “some­one to help re­move a fence,” “used lum­ber to build a gar­den,” “a lad­der to clean my gut­ter,” “a bike,” and “of­fice fur­ni­ture for a com­mu­nity cen­ter.” As each per­son shares, oth­ers in the cir­cle can break in to offer to meet the stated need, or with sug­ges­tions of how to meet it.

When every­one has had their turn, we go around the cir­cle again, each per­son stat­ing some­thing he or she would like to give. Some… Continue reading »

Silke Helfrich, David Bollier et al. argue that:

Commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social.

This document was prepared by the Steering Committee of the International Commons Conference “Constructing a Commons (ICC) based policy platform organized by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which took place in Berlin/Germany in November 2012. The ICC and was a major gathering of commoners from about 35 countries, representatives of social movements, political decision makers and commons research among them. (Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Beatriz Busaniche, Silke Helfrich, Julio Lambing, Heike Löschmann)

A. The commons will not succeed in challenging contemporary economics and conventional institutional design unless it:

· challenges the core beliefs of underlying conventional economics and the behavioral correlations induced by prevailing institutional designs;

· reinterprets the meaning of property from private ownership to collective stewardship; and

· develops coherent concepts that are also empirically provable and convincing alternatives to the conventional numerical “bottom lines”.

B. The inherent features of the commons are abundance and diversity.

· If we respect diversity and engineer for abundance, the commons continuously (re)-produce enough for all.

· Wherever we can – in case of nonrival resources and generosity – the product… Continue reading »

A short animated film to introduce Rachel Botsman’s important insights on collaborative consumption:

Throughline with Mindful Maps presents Collaborative Consumption: An RSA/Nominet Film Competition Short Film from Kate Hammer on Vimeo.