On the road

I'm in Curitiba, Brazil, jet-lagged and living off Guarana energy drinks. William Gibson mentions in Pattern Recognition that jet-lag happens when your soul is trying to catch up with you. I suspect mine to be somewhere over the Atlantic at this moment.

I used to love travelling, going places, meeting people, taking pictures in front of landmarks in an attempt to prove I was there. Now travel has become a nuisance and has lost all of its previous appeal. It has become a cliche to say this, but hell is an airport lounge. Forget the pitchforks and lakes of fire, to me there is nothing worse than bland lounges filled with neurotic travellers.

I'll be back to blogging about normal stuff as soon as my soul departs the baggage reclaim carousel.

Travel and "open" wifi

It's been quiet here in TechnoLlama for a while after knit-gate and the story about gold spammer executions being picked up by the always excellent Terra Nova. I am now off to Brazil for a conference, and as a reluctant traveller and Internet addict I am always very interested in finding adequate wifi coverage, which is not always easy and rather expensive.

For the last year I have been relying on BT Openzone, which came as part of my home broadband package. However, the free service was discontinued, and it has now been replaced with something called BT Fon. Fon is a really interesting experiment, an international network of users that agree to share their broadband connection with other Fon users. In their own words:

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. FON is a Community of people making WiFi universal and free. Our vision is WiFi everywhere made possible by the members of the Community, Foneros. We share some of our home Internet connection and get free access to the Community’s FON Spots worldwide!

The idea is ground-breaking, yet amazingly simple when you think about it. Road warriors will be used to picking up all sorts of closed networks when roaming the wireless space. The idea is to let you connect to those wireless networks in exchange for making your own service available to others. This seems to me to be a logical step-up of the sharing open ethic exemplified by tools like Wikipedia, Creative Commons and open source licensing. By sharing your resources you also benefit by being able to connect to a network anywhere in the world.

Those legally inclined will certainly get suspicious right now. What are the legal implications? What are the liabilities involved if someone uses your network to download porn, terrorist manuals, unlicensed copyright works, or boot-leg Rick Astley videos? Is there a chance that sharing your connection will make you vulnerable to attacks? Fon say that the connection is secure, and because all users need to user their login in order to connect, a record will be left somewhere that access to that dodgy site was not yours, but it will identify which username did it.

I have to admit that I really like the idea, it has all of the sharing elements that I like about the participatory web. However, I am sort of sceptical about BT's reasons for joining the Fon network. Call me cynical, but I am certain that BT realised that revenue from roaming wifi is not what it should be, and that it was partly to blame on people like me who got access as part of a package. Now they can charge me whenever I need to go online on the road and I cannot find a Fonero. Hopefully, the network will become big enough soon enough.

COMMUNIA Workshop

I attended a workshop on Friday in Turin, where I was attending the COMMUNIA workshop entitled Technology and the Public Domain. COMMUNIA is a European thematic network funded under the Econtentplus framework, which "aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment".

The workshop provoked some interesting discussion and had some good papers. My personal highlights were to hear Rishab Ayer Ghosh, who has edited a great book called Code. Also the workshop closed with a presentation by Séverine Dusollier, who impressed me as the most interesting proposal for the commons yet. Her proposal was with regards to the interaction between the public domain and the commons. What is the public domain? It is usually defined in negative terms, it is an absence of rights. It is not in legislations, so in most systems it is not even defined properly. What is the legal regime that applies to it? Her idea is to devise a legal regime for the public domain and make it an access right and a positive right subject to forms of protection, not subject to exclusivity. This has to do with some of copyright basics, such as the idea v expressions dichotomy, and the fact that the threshold of originality in copyright is very low. More and more things can be patented, so the public domain is being eroded. In order for it to survive, we need to express it possitively in the law.

What would be the shape of this positive public domain? That was less clear, and Séverine admitted that she is still thinking about it. She suggested that it could be to take the concept of commons (French Code version). "The use of the common is common to all."

Quite an intriguing theoretical discussion, but one of those large questions that we should ponder.

On leave

I'm spending December in the beautiful and sunny Costa Rica, so expect fewer posts than usual. Normal service will resume in January.

State of Play V

I'm in Singapore for State of Play V, which concludes a self-indulgent week of buffing-up my research into games and virtual worlds in preparation for next month's Gikii 2.

I've just come from a dinner where we were shown a documentary on businesses in Second Life, following the rise of virtual designers Pixel Dolls. I was intrigued by many of the features in the film, but not very keen on some of the broad claims made about virtual worlds, particularly some of the over-the-top gushing about Second Life and its importance.

Update: The movie is called Ideal World.

Croatia

I'm off to Croatia to the iSummit '07. If last year's Rio Summit is anything to go by, we can expect lively discussion, excellent presentations and the gathering of a truly multinational audience. I hope to blog the event, so expect regular updates, wi-fi permitting of course.

Travel

I will be travelling to Sri Lanka, Spain and Croatia over the next few weeks, but I will try to update the blog whenever possible, wireless weather permitting.

Brussels

I'm in Brussels for a workshop of a European project on creating an E-Infrastructure for E-Science Digital Repositories. We are discussing legal and economic aspects of digital repositories.

Costa Rica

I'm on my way to the land of Imperial, gallo pinto and lovely beaches. I will still be posting regularly from home.

10 years of the WCT

I'll be attending a symposium next Friday at Case Western Reserve Law School in Cleveland entitled "The 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaties: 10 Years Later". There will be a webcast of the event for those interested.

New York, New York

I'm off to speak at the conference Impact of Technological Change on the Creation, Dissemination and Protection of Intellectual Property, organised by Albany Law School, and taking place at the Cornell Club, New York.

WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement

I am representing Alfa - Redi at the 3rd meeting of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement. This is my first time at WIPO, and it is proving to be quite an interesting and eye-opening experience on how international institutions actually work.

I will be blogging more details as they happen. So far we have heard from representatives from Romania, Nigeria and Sri Lanka on their efforts to enforce intellectual property. Most of the enforcement efforts seem to be directed against counterfeiting.

Alfa - Redi has observer status, so I am sitting right at the back of the large room. First there are member states, then other international organisations, and then the observers.