George Dafermos' Weblog

Monday, June 06, 2005

CONVERSATIONS WITH POWER

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is hosting an online discussion about 'Intellectual Property in the Information Society' from June 1 to 15, 2005. The conclusions of the Online Forum will form part of WIPO's contribution to the WSIS Tunis Summit. There are 10 different themes for discussion, including 'Open Information: At Odds with the IP System?' and 'Enforcement of IP Rights'. If you have any comments about file sharing, copyright enforcement, etc. (and who hasn't?), this may be a good place to post them.

is that a bad joke? in the time when the quintessential insitutional-ised guardians of the imaginary of intellectual property law define and control the space wherein their critique takes place, in effect turning the critique of the spectacle to a purely spectacular critique, the act, or even the mere thought, of indulging in conversations of the above type in hope that something may come out of it is essentially a hallucination.

11:53:05 AM

Say it loud [] Trackback []

NON

the french said NON, and the dutch followed their example three days later, rejecting en masse the european consitution, or actually, the farse that is the european constitution. and now the cybernetic brains are hard at work, trying to decipher what was the meaning of this public vote. i don't know about how the dutch media complex confronted the issue, but in the case of france, the NON is important for a number of reasons. it is interesting to note that all french (mass) media, unanimously, including traditionally left-wing papers such as La Liberation and Le Monde, urged french citizens to vote for the constitution. yet, despite all this considerable effort, the french did not. au contraire, the french social unconscious rejected the european consistution, and nobody knows for certain why they did so, especially given that most europeans know very little about what the consitution really says, or, for that matter, is about to change. it was my conviction that mass media have the complete means to shape public opinion completely, much like a puppeteer manipulating the voiceless marionettes, and, hence, i believed that the french would vote for the consistution but they didn't. which leads me to wonder: is there any space left for un-mediated formation of opinion outside the sphere of influence of mass media? the NON seems to suggest so.

also pertaining to the discussion about why the NON is also a NON to the expansion of the patent space, frederic couchet, ludovic penet and others have written and signed their Au NON de la Democracie.
11:38:16 AM

Say it loud [] Trackback []