p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Sam I am and Henry Ermich have an interesting and spirited copyright, copywrong, thread going in Sam I Am and the Statute of Anne.

Check it out

Meanwhile, Henry (his real name) suggests Sam I am (obviously not his real name) might want to check out the P2P Foundation, which also has an editable Wiki.

It kicks off with a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I had a look at the foundation site and thought some of you might be interested as well.

Here’s what it says in the About section »»»

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives proposes to be a meeting place for those who can broadly agree with the following propositions, which are also argued in the essay or book in progress, P2P and Human Evolution:

• that peer-to-peer based technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it

• that the “distributed network” format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organizing formats, i.e. it represents different processes for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of ‘nonrepresentational democracy’, where an increasing number of people are able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of autonomous and interdependent networks and peer circles; that global governance, and the global market will be, and will have to be, more influenced by modes of governance involving multistakeholdership

• that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, i.e. modes of peer property, such as the General Public Licese and the Creative Commons licenses should be himpromoted and extended

• that the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public License, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provides for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life

• that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential of showing that the new more egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an engaged and meaningful life as expressed in one’s work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival

• that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of ‘cognitive capitalism’; P2P is a language which every ‘digital youngster’ can understand. However, ‘peer to peer theory’ addresses itself not just to the network-enabled and to knowledge workers, but to the whole of civil society (the ‘multitudes’), and to whoever agrees that the core of decision-making should be located in civil society, and not in the market or in the state, and that the latters should be the servants of civil society

• it combines subjectivity (new values), intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.Bruton

The foundation Wiki also quotes Margaret Mead, to wit, “never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world”.

JN

 (Cheers, Henry)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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