Mako's Talks and Presentations (English)

This is an interesting group of documents for those who are interested in the philosophy of Linux, FLOSS and other "Intellectual Property" issues. For example, here is an excerpt from "The politics and technology of control" (excerpts):

"Why I'm Scared

There is a rift between the role that I believe that control of ideas and expression should be conceived and the way that control is conceived and implemented in technology.

1. this is where the girl scouts come in;

2. trusted computing and digital rights management;

3. this is where DVD protection comes in w/ Jon Johansen

4. another DMCA horror story involves...Dmitri Skylarov...

There has become a gap between the control (esp. law & technology) and reality. Either the way we articulate control or reality needs to change."

It's fascinating to me that Mako uses the word "scared". I know a lot of people who think that people from developed countries are scared of things which are not scary. The things which are scary here are snakes and volcanoes; intellectual property is for Gringos who have time and money for that sort of nonsense. This may seem like a flippant attitude, but it's really not. It's simply a matter of the context of where you live, which makes different things seem more or less important.

From further on in the outline:

"Collaborative Writing

I chose collaborative writing because:

- it looked a lot like free software in its production;

- I knew ideas could be formed effectively by groups;

- I knew people use have done it all the time;

- it seemed to be lacking from every writing class I've taken in my life (the irony is that even my DIV3 is largely a work of single authorship);

Why collaborative writing is important:

1. 87% of industry uses collaborative writing

2. studies have shown that people working together collaboratively produce better

3. it's historically precedented (leads into the next bit)

How collaborative writing is persistent (I won't talk about this in any depth but it's in my Div III):

1. medieval glosses and annotations (example 1, example 2); Chinese literature (no intellectual property up until the 20th century);

2. early on, copyright served as a powerful, but flexible entity. early American pirating; hypocrisy of Mark Twain; Wordsworth and Coleridge;

3. editors in the twentieth century: Eliot and Pound; Carver and Lish;

So why does nobody write collaboratively? Why don't we even talk about it?"

Good questions and observations which I haven't seen presented together before. If this piques your interest, you might want to look at a few more things. Here is Mako's main page, with links to other things he is involved in, and here is his kuro5hin diary.

There are lots of other interesting concepts presented in Mako's pages. I really enjoyed visiting the site and thinking about his ideas; I hope you will too.

Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica