randform

This is a follow-up post to the german randform post “comment to gema-vs-youtube on Spreeblick” (and its partial translation) and the post “A digital agenda” which are amongst others concerned with the german collecting society GEMA.
In the german post the wish for a

“…“Musikanbietgenossenschaft” :) (oder ähnlichem)”…

i.e. for a “music collecting cooperative” was voiced. Such a cooperative seems now underway. According to the german Heise Online article: “Geplante GEMA Alternative sieht sich auf gutem Weg” a cooperative called Cultural Commons Collecting Society (C3S) is going to be established.

Especially important is here that the C3S initiative is thought to be europe-wide thus the digital agenda plays a role here. The Cultural Commons Collecting Society (C3S) is sofar only a gathering but – according to Heise – there are plans to form a european cooperative in the first half of 2013 and to be functionable in about 2 years. If you are musically active you can officially display your interest via signing a declaration of intent which is important for the representation in front of legal bodies like the german patent office. Tim (who is still a GEMA member) has already signed the declaration.

Schöne Feiertage – have great holidays ! from Berlin-Marzahn*

(*a district of Berlin which was recently even mentioned in the New York Times!)

The last blog post received quite some comments which I would like to answer. So reader Jared Khithim asked about the use of my proposals for a pre-preprint achive:

..this seems to be a quite clear violation of your copyrights! Are you going to sue Holtzbrinck?

Reader M. Boulangel saw this similarily and wondered wether I wouldn’t like to set up my own preprint archive and last but not least reader Mandy asked about the CC-10 birthday party:

…is boring talks the new berlin party scoop?

So regarding the copyright issue: No – I don’t want to sue Holtzbrinck. In fact it’s not only that I find my suggestions not overly original and rather intuitive but also that I think that it’s good that at least some people care about the issue. Moreover I don’t want to set up a preprint archive – I actually had already set up** and maintained a preprint archive for almost ten years at the former sfb288 which starts with lecture notes* by Ludvig Faddeev from autumn 1991.

I could also imagine that eventually some kind of pre-preprint archive may exist already at some institution, as there are meanwhile many institutional repositories. Or there may be related projects. Like for the Mimirix project we used trac for (amongst others) reading the students works and who knows wether there aren’t universities who already set up their own online dissertation pre-print archive. I still think it would be good to have something like this with a long term support offered by a global public institution like the arxiv.org. A company like Holtzbrinck has to keep its own business interest in focus and this may unfortunately turn out to be eventually at some point against the original idea of science.

Concluding – I eventually would use my “copyrights” passively, that is in case someone would e.g. try to forbid the arxiv.org to set up such a thing, because of copyright issues (there are still software patents in the US) then I could eventually try to help the arxiv with my timestamped proposals, which are distributed over the internet. But I don’t think that this is going to happen.

*the preprints have no licence, since back then a kind of creative commons share-a-like licence was sort of self-understood for preprints, I actually don’t know how the arxiv handles these new laws.
**with technical help from colleagues

Regarding the party… the party of course started after the talks, images after the click.
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Leonard Dobusch and John Weitzmann at the CC-10-birthday party

randform hasn’t yet reported on a rather new online tool in scientific publishing which is called figshare. The german reader may have already read about it in an article by Aleks Scholz at the blog Riesenmaschine, the scientific minded reader may have used it already.
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As of today 12.12.12. the art blog vvork who used to be in randforms blog roll announced to stop vvork vvorking.

information fair for start-ups in Berlin

This is in part a little follow-up post to the last one concerning the WCIT conference.

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The informed internet citizen has probably noticed that the UN agency ITU is currently holding the World Congress on International Telecommunications (WCIT) (not to confuse with this WCIT – there is sofar no english Wikipedia page on that, the wikipedia ITU entry has some informations). Unfortunately despite its international UN character and its rather fundamental agenda, which concerns the future use of the Internet, not all policy-relevant documents of the congress are published, so there is meanwhile a WCITleaks website where the missing information is partially collected. WCITleaks holds also research and analysis of WCIT proposals, which includes policies which may endanger net-neutrality , may eventually invite censorship and which alarmed even the internet giant google.

So alone by looking at the fact that it was necessary to set up a WCITleaks website the official words from the WCIT website:

The treaty sets out general principles for assuring the free flow of information around the world, promoting affordable and equitable access for all and laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and market growth.

leave behind quite a strange taste.

market growth for UNleaks.org’s like WCITleaks.org?

Tanz im Aufbauhaus inspired by 90’s hip hop music, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and the Megaphoneannouncements at S-Bahnhof Friedrichsfelde-Ost.

The song is about humans and machinization. Translation eventually later.

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Following an article in the Daily Mail, there is currently an interesting discussion at Azimuth about the interpretation of climate data. While the Daily Mail is convinced that global warming stopped 16 years ago as written in the article:
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it, the news agency France24 looks at what for example shipping developpers think about the karma of global temperature variations:
Shipping developers eye up route through melting Arctic
However I don’t know how much the depiction* of Walrusses in a russian canteen should indicate how this may change the menu.

*please scroll down to about to the half of the image, next to the word Stoloweia.