[FM Discuss] wikimania

[adam hyde]

hi,

we just got a letter saying the panel proposed to wikimania will be
accepted:

Submission for Wikimania 2009- Wiki Borg (panel)
Title: Authorship, Licenses and the Wiki Borg (Panel)
Track: Academic
Theme: Free knowledge

Description:
The romantic notion of the writer as the sole creator of a body of work
has been legally constructed since manuscript culture was displaced by
the industrial printing press. Since then 'authorship' married with
all-rights-reserved copyright has formed the backbone of the publishing
industry as we know it today. Recently however, it could be argued that
the age of collaborative content production is back: the romantic author
is dead, long live the wiki borg.

Nevertheless, open content licenses are still based on copyright law.
Many authors and projects who adopt open content licensing do not
produce texts collaboratively. They remain as authors and are
still entitled to decide whether they permit modification, and only when
they do, they author and then allow derivations with attribution. This
is derivative culture, not collaborative culture. The author is still
the source – the historical idea of romantic authorship is still
dominant.

Furthermore, with many existing open content licenses, authors' freedom
to choose between various licenses may hinder collaboration and reuse.
As witnessed in the recent Wikipedia license-migration process from the
GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution Share
Alike license, while open content licenses aim at simplifying
collaborative creation, sharing and reuse, compatibility issues have
become new hurdles for collaborative projects.

Issues this panel proposes to address include:
* Is it necessary to break down the idea of romantic authorship?
* What is necessary to break down the idea of romantic authorship?
* Are open content licenses challenging or reinforcing the idea of
romantic authorship?
* How might the idea of authorship transform within collaborative
culture?
* Can copyright-based licenses fulfill the expectations of various
communities and collaboration practices?
* Can open licenses and the publishing industry encompass the demise of
the author?

The three panelists will each tackle the intricate relationship between
authors, licenses and collaborative projects from a different angle:

Shun-ling Chen: Shun-ling will try to separate the question of
authorship from the question of ownership in copyright law. To do so,
she will explore the various reasons that lead people to assert
attribution, especially in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. Is
attribution a way to attribute the speech to the right speaker so that
people can stand behind their statements? Is attribution a credit that
can be cashed out elsewhere although not in a project of free content,
or even within such a project? Is it possible that one can exercise
proprietary control of one's work simply by asserting a right to
attribution?

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay: Melanie will try to assess whether licensing
tools may support the various authorship models without being a hurdle.
Can Creative Commons attribution specifications represent the various
conceptions of authorship, expectations in terms of attribution and
collaboration forms? What is the impact of the Share Alike
interoperability among licenses ported in international jurisdictions?
Are community guidelines and social norms more effective tools?

Adam Hyde: Adam will explore collaboration within the publishing
'industry' with case studies of FLOSS Manuals. Can publishers cope with
the demise of the author? What possible social and technical models are
there to support collaborative text publishing within a traditional book
publishing environment?


adam

-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

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