Month: January 2007

If a picture tells a thousand words, this chart, which graphically demonstrates global royalty flows, instantly demonstrates why the development agenda deserves our support and why Canada – alongside virtually every other country – will continue to face enormous pressure from the U.S. on IP policy.

Note in particular the shrinking of Canada, South America, Africa, most of Asia, and Australia, all of which represents significant outflows of royalty fees.

Link to PDF chart with explanations, Luxembourg is top royalty earner (relative to population).

Link to Raw data.

Thanks to Michael Geist’s Blog:

Why the WIPO Development Agenda Matters

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Canada

Nature – a for-profit publisher – has learned that a group of big scientific publishers has hired Eric Dezenhall – known as the “pit bull of public relations” – to take on the open-access movement. …

… Dezenhall, author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Celebrities and Businesses, is more widely known for his work protecting and un-tarnishing companies and celebrities’ reputations. As reported in Business Week, Dezenhall used money from ExxonMobile to fight the environmental group Greenpeace, as well as worked for former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling, who is now serving a 24-year sentence for fraud. …

Link to full article at Nature.

La Euroscience workgroup on scientific publishing annonce une pétition en ligne, sponsorisée par la DFG, JISC, SPARC-Europe, SURF, et DEff.

Petition:

http://www.ec-petition.eu/index.php?p=petition

Sujet: La Recommandation A1 de la Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe , étude exhaustive (>100 pages) publié en 2006, commissioné par la DG-Recherche, Commission Européenne.

RECOMMENDATION A1.

GUARANTEE PUBLIC ACCESS TO PUBLICLY-FUNDED RESEARCH RESULTS SHORTLY AFTER PUBLICATION

Research funding agencies have a central role in determining researchers’ publishing practices. Following the lead of the NIH and other institutions, they should promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories, after a (possibly domain-specific) time period to be discussed with publishers. This archiving could become a condition for funding.

The following actions could be taken at the European level:

(i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and

(ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented.

Lien vers l’Etude complète.

The Jamendo team is going ahead full steam in 2007!

Laurent will be at this years MIDEM (Riviera Hall – Luxemburg Pavillon – Booth R31.35) at Cannes from 20th au 24th January.

Luxembourg, 15th January : Announcing revenue sharing with artists

Since the end of 2006, Jamendo allows users to download for free more than 2000 albums under Creative Commons licenses. Now Jamendo is bringing its concept up to the next level : half of the advertising revenue will be shared with the artists.

Every month, the artists who registered to this Revenue Sharing program will share 50% of the advertising revenue of Jamendo. Shares will be proportional to the number of visits on the artists’ pages on Jamendo. The artists registering now to the program will share the advertising revenue from the period beginning on the 1st January 2007. This program will be in beta stage for the first term and might be improved after on.

This new system is currently one of the most innovative ways to permit both the diffusion of music under Creative Commons licenses and a revenue for the artists. This new revenue stream will be a complement to the donation system that allows the listeners to give money to an artist via jamendo and PayPal.

For more information on this program :

www.jamendo.com/static/help_revenueshare/

Press release in French

Jamendo widgets

Now you can put your favourite Jamendo tracks right on your blog or homepage, using the new Jamendo widgets:

And don’t forget the other 2000 Creative Commons albums!

Open Source, das heißt offener Quellcode und meint gemeinhin Software, die jeder nach Belieben studieren, benutzen, verändern und kopieren darf. Vor rund 25 Jahren begann die “Freie Software” als eine kleine Gruppe von Programmierern, die sich gegen die Kommerzialisierung ihrer Arbeit sträubten. Heute treiben Open Source-Programme große Teile des Internets an und machen den Größen der Softwareindustrie ernste Konkurrenz.

Und mehr noch: Open Source ist zu einer weltweiten sozialen Bewegung geworden, die antritt, nach der Software nun auch Wissen und Kultur zu “befreien”. Von Open Access bis Creative Commons, von Wikipedia bis Edubuntu arbeiten zehntausende Menschen weltweit über das Internet an einem kollektiven Schatz freien Wissens, entdecken neue Formen der Kooperation und des Gemeinsinns, und stören dabei alle Regeln von Urheberrecht und Wirtschaft auf.

In Interviews und Texten beleuchtet das Dossier das Phänomen “Open Source” von vielen Seiten, lässt Protagonisten und Kritiker zu Wort kommen und hilft, seine technischen, wirtschaftlichen und rechtlichen Mechanismen zu verstehen.

Gratis zum Download und vieles mehr auf www.bpb.de/themen/32K5CW

Zum Beispiel:

Into the Great Wide Open

Rund 20 Jahre nach ihren Anfängen ist die freie Software anerkannter Alltag in der Computerwelt. Nun boomt das “Open Source”-Prinzip auch in Medien, Kultur und Bildung.

Glossar

Von Allmende bis Wikipedia: Reise durch die Welt der Open Source in 60 Stichwörtern.