Asia Commons
I have just been to ‘Asia Commons‘, an event organised by Bellanet and local partners and funded by the IDRC (International Development Research Centre) and the UNDP’s International Open Source Network (IOSN).
On the first day of the event, I joined Lawrence Liang (ccIndia) and Ronaldo Lemos (ccBrazil) to talk about the intellectual property challenges and solutions in Asia, South America and Africa respectively. Ronaldo Lemos spoke of the pioneering efforts by those who are experimenting with new ways of distributing knowledge and creativity in Brazil, while Lawrence Liang spoke about the ‘cultural flows’ represented by the piracy of films and music in Asia (Liang) and the need to move away from ‘knee-jerk media responses to piracy’.
Lawrence Liang’s assessment of piracy is well worth a read. You can find his article entitled ‘Media Empires and Renegade Pirates’ here.
I met some incredible Commons-builders at the Summit ‘ including Michel Bauwens, who has developed one of the most comprehensive directories of resources on ‘peer to peer sharing’ at p2pfoundation.net (find out more from Fred Noronha’s post above), and Patcha from Jinbonet who, together with an organisation called IPLeft in Korea, developed a cartoon campaign against the IP chapter in Korea-US FTA negotiations. Patcha says they will produce 6 more series of cartoons and that there are plans to make them available in English. You can find the cartoon entitled ‘Copyright term extension amounts to piracy of the public domain’ here. Other cartoons cover DRM, censorship and online service providers and temporary storage.
The results of Asia Commons will be discussed in a ‘Birds of a Feather’ session at the upcoming iCommons Summit ‘ hopefully updating those who weren’t able to attend this invaluable event, and working out concrete steps for regional collaboration in the future. If the energy and enthusiasm at Asia Commons is anything to go by, I’m really looking forward to some exciting results!