by
Anonymous Coward
on
Wednesday May 15, @10:25AM (
#22)
hi
i wonder if the knowbotics can explain to me what 'public domain' is...it seems their critique is about how ISPs somehow restrict the 'public domain' (sic) of the internet
isnt the internet merely a construct developed first by the US military, then wealthy US educational institutues, then by commercial entities? which part of this is 'public' exactly? what about the 4 billion people not connected to the internet...is this still somehow public even though the net is occuped only those that happen to live in wealthy nations?
i am confused here...when the knowbotics say artists need "new instituions" to house artist works...do you mean new data infrastructures? a second internet that somehow is built on public resources and hence is a part of this so called 'public domain'?
what exactly are they on about?
i think what they do, since they have admitted that they could have hosted the port scanning machine in germany to continue the project, is not to point out that there are problems with this 'public domain'...i think what they merely point out is that the particular ISP that the museum works with has a particular contract that it gets all its commercial clients to sign, and this contract, in this particular case, restricts this particular artwork in this particular context...doesnt sound very news worthy to me
maybe the new york times had a slow news day?
dont get me wrong, i like the knowbotics works including this one, but it doesnt really seem like the 'legal bug' is very interesting, the work is good without all this unnecessary do-dah
Quoting Steve: "The fact that Minds of Concern is potentially undermined by the legal system in the form of a standard or "shrinkwrap" license the New Museum has with its ISP is not insignificant."
Absolutely, and becoming less and less insignificant as time goes by and we find ourselves being put in an increasingly smaller intellectual property box - not because of public interest copyright issues but because of income stream protection by the usual suspects. See the shameless promolgation of disinfomration on the value of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to date: DMCA [wired.com] Where is the representative of the public interest in policy creation on this topic?
We should only encourage those willing to probe the borders in the public interest if it makes the public policy discussion visible and engaging to more than the club of industry insiders.
