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.

Joost Smiers, Professor of Political Science and Research Fellow in the Research Group Arts & Economics at the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Netherlands, together with his colleague Marieke van Schijndel recently published an essay arguing for the abolition of copyright.

The Antenna Tux radio station from Germany is broadcasting an interview about the Free Technology Academy with me on 22 September 2009.

A while ago David Jacovkis and myself did a workshop for and at the Trans National Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam.

As communicated here before, and by several stakeholders, such as government (1, 2)  and educational partners (1, »

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northxsouth has published an interesting article on the relevance of the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay for the FS community. Their arguments are in line with the ones repeatedly expressed by prominent members of the FSF: the final goal of these lawsuits and campaigns is to extend even more the reach of copyright law, to impose DRM-like technologies in the industry and finally to create a situation where people are just afraid of sharing.

The Spanish Internet Users Association (Asociación de Internautas) has published a manifest to raise awareness on the most urgent issues regarding European citizens' rights in the digital arena: the Telecom package, privacy of electronic communications, broadband access to the Internet, the technological neutrality of the Net and the balance between author's rights and the coll

The ODF Alliance, of which the Free Knowledge Institute is a member, has published a Fact Sheet [PDF; also available as text on their website] for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The ODF Allliance says their testing revealed "serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the