Yestderday more than 115.000 sites blacked out their site to protest against SOPA, the "Stop Online Privacy Act" and PIPA, the PROTECT-IP ACT. We simply say: Stop SOPA, stop the ridiculous metaphor of "piracy" and the war against Internet. The Internet has brought us a new organisational model, and "intellectual property" will need different regulations to cope with that and with it the busines models of intellectual monopolists.

Posted by Wouter at the Microfactoria Blog.

From our friends at La Quadrature du Net:

A couple of weeks ago Jan Stedehouder, a Dutch journalist, writer and Open Source advocate, published a blog post (english version here) about the use of Silverlight in the Dutch public education system.

On September 12, 2011, the winner of the International Prize will be announced! (see Dutch)

The International Prize is meant for a novel and transferable project, which has concrete impact in the Netherlands as well as in one or more other countries. The Prize is administered by the Learn for Life Foundation and is awarded to a Dutch organisation or institute, who make their expertise beneficial to innovating projects in the area of international vocational education.

Recently we came together with the partners of the Free Technology Academy at the Open University Netherlands in Heerlen to discuss strategies and concrete plans to go forward. In this post I will try to explain the main aspects of the vision we discussed in the session "Evolving Free Technology Education together. A vision for the Free Technology Academy."

As you may know the Free Knowledge Institute seeks to advance the sharing of knowledge and take away technical, social and legal impediments. One of our core activities lies in education and over the last years we have established a network of universities and specialised groups working together in offering master level courses online through the Free Technology Academy. Together we want to go further and develop a shared master curriculum on Free Technologies (FT). We understand FT to include Free Software (OSS / Libre Software), Open Standards, Free Hardware.

On June 1st, 2010, Karin Spaink gave an excellent speech during an expert meet on e-books. She is urging the publishing industry to learn from all the mistakes the music industry made. E-books need to be protected against technical measures to control users, such as DRM, and should be much cheaper than printed books.

Read her speech on De Nieuwe Reporter, in Dutch.

Michel Bauwens writes in the P2P blog about the talk A Radical Critique of Free Culture that Geert Lovink presented at re:publica 2010. Many of the participants in the Free Culture Forum that have seen Lovink's talk are surprised, to say the least, about some of his comments on "the Free Culture movement". Bauwens' comments in the P2P blog are a good example of these opinions.

A critical approach to any social movement is necessary and positive for the health of the movement. However, the critique in this case is misleading in several ways, which doesn't help at all to build a constructive debate.

There have been and still are intense flamewars about the use of the terms free, libre and open in the context of software, knowledge and licensing. As the Free Software movement was the first in defining the main concepts (of copyleft, using copyright to protect the freedoms and thus stimulate sharing of knowledge), let us start there.