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:

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.

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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