I have just posted two new photo sets to my flicker page. Both of them contain pictures that i have taken at performances of my girlfriend’s (Constanza Macras) dance/theatre company ‘dorky park‘. The first one contains pictures of a performance of her latest production ‘Big in Bombay’ last february at the Schaubühne in berlin. The second set contains pictures taken from an performance of the third part of her MIR trilogy, ‘MIR #3 endurance’. the pictures were taken at a performance in april in Bordeaux, this was the first time the piece was performed in three years. MIR #3 is probably my favorite piece from Constanza but that is probably also due to the fact that it was created when i did not know her yet. Suddenly seeing the piece (as opposed to witness the process of a piece evolving from scratch) in Bordeaux pretty much blew me away.

Yesterday was the German premiere of ‘star biz’ a documentary film produced as part of the project import-export. The film uses mercedes as a tool to examine the process of cultural appropriation of western consumer and luxury goods in India. The film gives an surprisingly unfiltered insight into the corporate culture of Daimler Chrysler. The interviews with Daimler Chrysler managers among them CEO Hans-Michael Huber reveal a fair amount of arrogance and narrow mindedness among these ‘ambassadors of indo german globalisation’ (quote from the article about the film in the import export publication).

At the same time the swabian accents and the insitance on provincial german lifestyles among the ‘mercedes family’ members make these interview extremely hilarious to watch. The film contrasts the Mercedes family with the bollywood empire of star producer Ravi Chopra and features lots of footage of ‘merc’ driving Bollywood heros and villans.

Star biz is available (with German and English subtitles) on dvd as part of the publication ‘cultural transfer – import export – india, germany, austria’.

It seems like i am surrounded by references to the public domain lately. sarai readers, conference topics, creative commons dedications and now there is even talk about renaming the public research programme of waag society (which i run) into ‘public domain’.

In the last two days i have however been reminded that this is nothing new. it appears that i have always been surrounded by people who care a lot about the public domain. My childhood/puberty (when is unsuccessfully trying to master the art of skateboarding) favorite video is powell peraltas 1988 classic skate movie ‘public domain‘. Skateboarding has always been about living in the physical public domain which nowadays even seems to includes fighting against technical protection measures.

After i stopped skateboarding i worked for almost ten years as a bike messenger. For bike messenger the urban public domain is where you spend a lot of your time (waiting for runs, socialising after work). I just came across this picture which i took while being in NYC for metropoloco in August 2000. I do not remember the name of the messenger, but this picture is one of my all time favorites as it really captures the spirit of being a bike messenger in making your living in the hostile environment of ever more privatizing cities. (the full text on the bandana reads ‘we live in public’)

Seems like it has been raining for more than a week now. While this is really getting on everyone’s mood it it provides the newspapers with an opportunity to fill their summer gap with good news stories. Today’s Volkskrant had the following two stories on page three (which is main domestic politics page): ‘Mild summer weather reduces mortality among old people‘ and ‘Increase in visitors at weatheronline.nl due to rain‘. Positive thinking indeed…

Maybe i have been a bit premature in my condemnation of the French and Dutch no votes on the European constitution back in June. The charter of fundamental rights that is part of the proposed constitution contains an article relating to intellectual property rights. In all its simplistic beauty article 17(2) reads like this:

Intellectual property shall be protected

Yes this is it. No qualifications whatsoever, No purpose (‘for the progress of science and the useful arts’) like in the US constitution. If this constitution gets enacted in Europe intellectual property rights will be ‘fundamental rights’ and have to be protected by all means necessary.

Now i had come across this clause earlier, but for some reason it had been amused by what i then perceived as it’s nativity. Not so anymore:

On the 12th of july the Commission of the European Union launched a new proposal for a directive and framework decision on the penal enforcement of intellectual property rights. This directive seeks to harmonize legislation in the member-states regarding IPR infringements. It calls for substantial criminal penalties for intentional infringements of intellectual property rights on a ‘commercial scale’. Article 3 of the proposed Directive reads as follows:

“Member States shall ensure that all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, and attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements, are treated as criminal offences.”

The obvious problem with this article is that ‘attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements’ is an awfully vague definition of possible criminal behaviour. It does not take a lot of imagination to see the entertainment industry trying to force file sharing services out of business because of them providing aid to the intentional infringement of their users. This goes way further than the recent grokster ruling of the US supreme court which comes down to that a provider of a service that allows infringing uses can only held liable when this infringing use is part of his business model or endorsed by the provider. Under the proposed EU the motives of a service provider seem to be completely irrelevant. It is enough if the service is aiding intentional infringement that is taking place on a comercial scale. As comercial scale is not defined as something that is undertaken by comercial entities for profit it probably also encompasses large scale infringement that is taking place on all mayor file sharing services (also see the last EDRI-gram on this issue).

While this directive will not automatically become law in its’s present form (as Urs Glasser points out in his blog) it is interesting to see how the commission justifies coming up with this directive in the first place: Apart for pointing out that the divergent practices of the member states need to be harmonized (which is the raison d’être for most of the commissions legislative work) the commission refers back to Article 17(2) of the proposed charter of fundamental rights:

This Directive respects fundamental rights and observes the principles recognised by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In particular, this Directive seeks to ensure full respect for intellectual property, in accordance with Article 17(2) of the Charter. (point 5 from the introduction of the proposed directive

For the casual reader this gives quite and amount of legitimacy to the proposed directive. Suddenly there is a fundamental right that needs to be protected. How can anybody in her sane mind have any objections against respecting the fundamental rights of the EU? Of course protecting our fundamental rights requires swift and immediate action!

I guess that makes clear that we do not only have to fight against this particular directive, but that we also need to turn more attention to the EU constitution once it will be revived from the dead (which will happen sooner or later). In the meanwhile someone should point the Commission to the fact that the constitution has been voted down by two member states and that they should stop making references to non-existing and dubious fundamental rights.

Have been on trains a lot the last couple of days. Since saturday i have gone from Amsterdam to Frankfurt back to Amsterdam and now i am almost in Berlin.

Since january i have traveld more than 43.000km by trains. Most of this has been within Germany some of it in Holland and i even took Amtrak from Boston to NYC. My bahn card wich gives me 50% reduction within Germany will expire in a bit over a month and that means that i will need to decide again if ill take a bahncard 50 or if i will go for the luxury of a bahncard 100 (which gives you unlimited free rail travel within Germany for a year and now even includes free public transport in more than 60 german towns all for €3250).

Economically it makes sense to get the bahncard 100 but only as long if i remain going from berlin to Amsterdam and Back three times a month. In other words it only makes sense if my life does not change much. Last year i did chicken out of buying the 100 because i did not trust my relationship or my commitment to my work enough to give both of them another year. Now it is a year further and i need to make this decision again (should have been smarter last year in the first place). I think i feel more confident this year…

Alright we might have a little rain problem here at what the hack, but i think we should put it into perspective. Just read a really impressive first hand account by Prashant Pandey from monsoon-struck Bombay on the reader-list. it ends with the following sentences:

[…] I want to get out of this gorgonic jam. I tell him all these are middle class losers who are stuck with their cars with their fat wives and we don’t have any (cars and wives).

Read the rest (beginning) of it here.

Today i soend most of my day trying to get a schengen visa for programmer/activist from cote d’ivoire and that meant i had to make lots of phone calls to cote d’ivoire and while doing that i dialed wrong numbers a couple of times.

Now if you dial the wrong number locally people are usually pissed that you disturb them. not so in this case, each time i got connected with someone wrong, the people started me asking all kinds of questions about me or amsterdam or what i was wearing (sic!) and generally tried to keep me on the phone for as long as possible which is a pretty interesting way of wasting your time… Much better than talking to the people you really need to talk to as the staff of the belgian embassy in abidjan is extremely not-funny, inflexible, rude (they hung up on me twice) and non cooperative when it coes to getting a visa on time.

Bottom line is Yapi won’t come to what the hack, because the Dutch don’t know where their embassy is (they send him to the embassy in Ghana where he was told that instead he should have gone to the belgian embassy in abijan) and the Belgians are rude, not-funny and not felxible at all…

In eastern Germany you get your abitur (the secondary school exam that entitels you to study at a university) after 12 years (where i grew up you have to do 13 years of school for the same exam), but apparently it also gets you less:

There are areas in east germany where more than a quater of the population is unemployed. And that is after the young and educated have left to find their luck elsewhere. This picture taken in greifswald (a port city in the north of meckelemburg vorpommern where unemployment rate is something like 19.8%) sums up the misery pretty well – if you ask me:

There are two stickers on the car. The white one advertises a personal housekeeping service, that is flexible, fast and cheap (eg an activity all the way at the bottom of the capitalist chain of exploitation) and the yellow sticker proudly states that the owner of this car has just (summer 05) gotten his or her abitur…

Last week we had a research and development workshop at Waag Society about 20 of us had to engage in 2 days socratic talking. I still do not really know what exactly this was suposed to accomplish but there are two additional days to come, so lets see.

For the first day of the workshop we were asked to write a short account of a day at the Waag in 2015. below you find my somewhat negative vision (all the other visions i have read were positive and mostly focussed on technologically augmented tele-working scenarios):

In mei heeft is de laatste software developer ontslagen. Sindsdien werken er nog 15 mensen in de naam van de Waag. Van de 15 zijn 12 project coördinatoren. De meeste van hun werken niet alleen voor de waag maar ook voor andere instellingen. Sinds 2012 is de Waag langzaam omgevormd naar een instelling die steeds minder mensen in dienst had. Dit is het directe gevolg van het afbouw van overheidssubsidie.

Nu bestaat de waag uit twee lagen. De eerste laag is de programma raad. de mensen in de programmaraad beoordelen projectvoorstellen die door de projectcoordinatoren (de tweede laag) ingebracht worden. projectvoorstellen die aan de missie van de Waag (jaarlijks bijgesteld door de programmaraad) voldoen worden door projectcoordinatoren zelfstandig uitgevoerd. In ruil voor een commissie voor de programmaraad mogen projectcoordinatoren de naam van de Waag bij het werven van fondsen, benaderen van partners en aquireren van projecten gebruiken. Zij zijn echter niet in dienst van de waag, moeten hun inkomsten uit de projecten realiseren en moeten jaarlijks opnieuw door de programmaraad ‘goedgekeurd’ worden.

Projectccordinatoren stellen zelf hun projectteams samen. Tot voor kort konden ze hiervoor nog op een pool van software ontwikkelaars, vormgevers, productie medewerkers beroep doen. Dit system is in de laatste jaren te duur en te inflexiebel gebleken. Nu worden worden voor projecten software ontwikkelaars uit india en iran en vormgevers uit libanon, israel en egyptie engageert met wie op afstand samen gewerkt wordt. Productie medewerkers worden op freelance basis bij producten betrokken en expertise op de gebieden van communicatie, interactie of educatie worden in de regel door projectpartners aangeleverd. Projecten worden erop beoordeelt hoeveel media aandacht zij genereren. Naast het aansturen van projectteams is de belangrijkste taak van Projectcoordinatoren het plaatsen van projectinformatie op de relevante blogs en de toongevende videosyndicatie platformen

Naast 10 projectcoordinatoren die applicaties en oplossingen produceren zijn er twee die maatschappelijke onderwerpen die uit de informatie revolutie zijn voortgekomen onder de aandacht brengen. hun werk bestaat voornamelijk uit het verzamelen van bijdragen van experts op een bepaalt terrein. deze bijdragen worden dan voor in verschillende formaten (audiocursussen, videofeatures, lespakketten) verzamelt en vervolgens op blogs, gespecialieserde knowledge sharing en videosyndicatie platformen geplaatst. in veel gevallen wordt ook in opdracht van overheidsinstellingen, universiteiten, musea en onderwijsinstellingen gewerkt die zo goedkoep een deel van hun programmas kunnen vullen of externe expertise inwinnen. In de laatste zijn er ook weer een aantal conferenties gehouden. Sinds 2007 toen duidelijk was geworden dat de fossile energie energiebronnen van de aarde sneller dan verwacht uitgeput zouden zijn, zijn er bijna geen conferenties meer gehouden omdat het invliegen van sprekers niet meer betaalbaar bleek. in de laatste jaren is er in de underground echter echter een cultuur van lokale conferenties over maatschappelijk relevante onderwerpen ontstaan. Deze lokale conferenties hebben een steeds grotere impact op de sociale structuur van de samenleving gekregen en Waag society is recentelijk begonnen om gesteund op de netwerken van zijn internationale partners (vaak zijn dat jonge softwareontwikklaars en designers die bij andere projecten betrokken zijn) contacten tussen locale initiatieven in andere regios te bemiddelen. Uit deze genetwerkte conferenties komen in de laatste tijd vaker nieuwe project ideen naar voren maar deze worden vaak buiten het waag framework gerealiseerd omdat het moeilijk is gebleken om hiervoor financiële steun bij lokale geldschieters te verkrijgen.

Voor de meeste projectcordinatoren zijn deze zijprojecten echter een van de belangrijkste reden om verder voor de Waag te werken omdat dit toegang tot deze netwerken betekend.