I'm at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, pronounced "wissis") in Tunis this week. The Summit is basically a process where countries around the world get together to develop a global vision of what the Information Society of the future should look like. As you can imagine, this "vision" differs dramatically from one country and region to the next. There have been great fights - especially in allowing civil society to contribute to proceedings. Intellectual property rights have been one of the major areas of contention and the results have been disappointing, with publishing and software lobbyists have maintained the status quo. Larry Lessig said that when he spoke at one of the preparatory meetings in Geneva the ITU forbade him for speaking about intellectual property. Obviously that just made Larry even more contraversial in his speech. I was invited by the IDRC (our funders) to speak about Commons-sense at one of the parallel events going on here. You can find some of the "real stories" here at the APC's blogging portal and at some of these sites.
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