I was having a conversation the other day about a talk Alan Blackwell gave a couple of years back, about the history of the “Cambridge phenomenon”. This reminded me how, many moons ago, I attended a conference he organised entitled Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy. It was about the possible wider cultural significance of challenges, in the software world, to entrenched ideas of intellectual property.
At the time I wrote a report on it, for my then employers. If only I’d had the foresight to keep a copy for myself…
I’ve forgotten much about it, but before I forget even more, here’s a brief review, a decade too late.
First day:
- One of Martha Woodmansee or Marilyn Strathern (I forget which) was very good on the writing of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, or rather on how the involvement of William Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, was marginalised due to the Romantic conception of poetic genius.
- Geert Lovink apparently wanted to question the notion of freedom. He showed a noisy Flash video to explain his thinking. However, he hadn’t really done his homework. Someone pointed out that he failed to distinguish “free as in speech” and “free as in beer” just as Richard Stallman walked in. Good timing.
- Christopher Kelty made some gentle digs at Eric Raymond’s more famous essays, regarding his “participant-observer” studies of free software development and the conclusions about reputation that he drew from them. (Personally, I’d have picked up on Raymond’s misconception of how cathedrals were built, but that’s by the by.)
- Michael Century discussed the philosophical subtleties involve in 2 Live Crew’s use of Roy Orbison samples. His interest was on the aesthetic impact of copyright enforcement. He seemed like a nice bloke. (He later asked me directions to The Eagle. All of a sudden I had no idea how to get there. Oops.)
- Richard Stallman discussed copyright in terms of the philosophy of “natural rights”, which confused some people. I don’t know if he genuinely believed in natural rights, or if he just expressed things like that because that’s how the American constitution was framed.
- James Boyle was funny and erudite, and rather Niles Crane-like. His talk was based around the tensions between economic rationality, the legal system, and popular conceptions of fairness. (Examples: people are generally more sympathetic to novelists wanting to earn royalties than big pharmaceutical companies wanting to restrict the countries where their products are sold.)
- I’ve largely forgotten Bruce Perens’ talk. Possibly he was there as Richard Stallman’s minder.
- On the subject of which, at some point there was a talk by a lawyer specialising in intellectual property. He managed to upset Richard Stallman a great deal. (The situation wasn’t helped by many people not knowing who Stallman was. They treated his attempt to shout the speaker down as straightforward rudeness. Which it was, sort of.)
- In the evening, Glynn Moody (who had just published his book) did an after-dinner speech dominated by microphone woes. I remember that he compared Don Knuth to J. S. Bach, but not much else.
- After dinner a documentary about Open Source was shown. The bit I remember was sweet: Alan Cox and his wife looking out over Swansea bay while reading entries from their respective blogs. (This was before he switched to Welsh.)
The second day there was sort of interesting stuff about access to raw data in astronomy and genomics, and a slightly cringe-inducing moment when a couple of guys were trying to give the head bloke from Red Hat a hard time for sometimes selling proprietary software.
However, I was flagging by this point. In the middle of the day I snuck off to buy a present for the wife. At the same time, the Open Source hardliners I just mentioned snuck off to buy a new video game (Black and White?). They didn’t see the irony of this. Apparently the game was really good because you could pretend to be God.
There was an on-going performance art piece called “Ice Cream for Everyone”. The artists had found some old, secret ice-cream recipe. They made load of ice-cream, gave it to people, and told them where to download the recipe. Someone said “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like, and I like ice-cream.”
Later in the day a woman (from Cambridgeshire Library Service?) suggested that people who felt strongly about open source software should do more to help teach others. A valid point, although sometimes strong feelings about a subject and the ability to teach it well can be at slight odds.
Overall conclusion? Well, I didn’t have to pay for it, it got me off work for two days, and I don’t recall there being a single boring moment. As for there being a wider cultural significance to open source software? Well, I suppose it sounds plausible…
By coincidence I also attended! My lasting memory is of Richard Stallman being very rude to the poor lawyer who was only there to give his legal opinion, not on behalf of the entire legal system that Stallman obviously disapproved of. Apart from that it was a great event.