Dear friends,

I proposed a symposium on copyleft revolution to this conference to be held in Mumbai at TISS from 3rd till 7th of Dec 2007.

http://www.5thiccg.org/

Those of you want to speak in the symposium, please submit your proposals before the end of 20th August 2007. The shape of the session will be confirmed by 3rd of September 2007. The symposium will accommodate about five speakers on the panel, and the total duration including at least half-an-hour discussion will be about 2 hours.

Copyleft Revolution

In the last thirty years the role and significance of Information and Communication Technology have grown significantly, reconfiguring the spatial logic of modern society. However, it has not remained an equally accessed base and gone under the control of a few global corporations that are investing billions of dollars for its modernisation, impacting the process of knowledge construction and dissemination for a small section of the society and thereby transforming other fields of human creativity. As a response to the above hegemonistic framework, a parallel cultural and political movement is under way that is growing at an unprecedented pace and influencing the way how science, software and other kinds of symbolic forms are created, published and distributed. Popularly known as the Copyleft culture, it is essentially a Free Software Movement that took off by an innovative use of the existing copyright and by publishing software under a copyleft license. This license is meant to give four fundamental rights to the user of the software published under the copyleft license: to use it for any purpose, to understand how it works, to make modifications, and to distribute the modifications.

One of the major outcomes of this revolution is the GNU/Linux operating system (popularly known by its misnomer, Linux). The copyleft movement is currently transforming other fields of human creativity as well---science, poetry, music, cinema and other symbolic forms. Of these, the most popular success story is Wikipedia.org, the largest multilingual encyclopedia of the world. There are other, not yet fully fructified, movements such as public library of science, open access, creative commons, open music, etc.

The proposed session aims at generating awareness about the Copyleft movement in general, and discussing its relation to science and education in particular. While challenging the patent and other similar systems, it also intends to deliberate on a new model of development of ICT, centered around collaboration and sharing among different communities.

Contact address : Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Mumbai, India, nagarjun@gnowledge.org