Free Software and Sustainability in the Knowledge Society

Abstract

The lecture discusses political, legal and economic aspects of digital goods of knowledge and culture. It transfers the concept of sustainable development into the digital Knowledge Society, analyzes the phenomenon «Free (Open Source) Software» and transfers its concept to other digital goods (text, audio, video, image). Students work in groups on selected topics.

Objective

Digitization and the Internet allow handling knowledge in a way, which deeply threatens traditional industries. The trend to privatize knowledge once publicly available («intellectual property») proceeds faster than law and regulation can follow adequately. As a central political protest campaign, the «Free Software Movement» (famous for GNU/Linux) can present a useful alternative towards a sustainable knowledge society. We identify and evaluate the political aspects of digitization, intellectual property und digital media. The concept of "sustainable development" will be adopted for the knowledge society by considering the special nature of «knowledge» as a resource. The «Free Softwrae Movement» is discussed as central protest force against the current trend. After the lecture, you should be able to - understand and evaluate political and legal aspects around digital goods of knowledge and culture - explain the concept of sustainable development applied to knowledge as a resource - transfer the concepts of Free Software to other domains of digital goods

Content

Life in 2005: Within minutes you can make perfect copies of high-value digital goods of knowledge or culture (as text, audio, video, image or software) and distribute them around the globe. All that with neglectable costs. For the first time in humankind's history, «Digitization plus Internet» allows (theoretically) free access and exchange of knowledge globally at minimal costs. A tremendous opportunity for societal development, North and South. «Cool, so what's the problem?» The problem is, that this reality poses a fundamental threat to today's business model of the knowledge and culture industries (starting from the music label and Hollywood, via publishers, up to software monopolists). Powerful commercial interests are on stake as «knowledge» (the fourth factor of production) will become ever more important in the 21st century. Accordingly, «piracy» and «file-sharing» are attacked with all means. At the core lies the question about the conceptual design of property in digital assets. For that, we apply a concept of «intellectual property», which is several hundred years old and does not address today's reality in an adequate manner, sometimes leading to absurd situations. Its original goal seems to get forgotten: Tohelp society to develop by spreading knowledge as much as possible. Using the PC becomes the new cultural technique of the 21st century. In contrast to «reading, writing and arithmetics», this new cultural technique cannot exist in isolation, but depends on a hard- and software infrastructure. This dependence extends to the provider of the infrastructure, who can define technical rules, which kann take away or restrict the user's freedom. Even advanced users may have difficulties in recognizing these, often hidden, restrictions and in evaluating their societal relevance. But exactly these invisible consequences we need to understand and question, because they decide about access, distribution and usage of digital knowledge. Today exists a growing political movement for «Free Software», with «GNU/Linux» as its most popular symbol, which can be compared to the environmentalist movement of the 60s and 70s. The movement fights for not treating software code as private property but as a central cultural good available to all without private interests. Based on the success of the Free Software movement, other initiatives started extending the concepts to other domains (e.g. scientific knowledge, music)... As a «teaser» to the lecture, you are invited to read the essay «ETH Zurich - A Pioneer in Digital Sustainability!». It can be downloaded from www.essays2030.ethz.ch . Starting from September more information can be found on www.TheAlternative.ch... Stay tuned.

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