Video

For over a million years we lived as hunter-gatherers in small family groups, for thousands of years we lived as farmers in small villages, for 200 years we lived in cities and built industry. Now we live globally in a world that is changing faster every day than ever before through new ideas and technologies.

Sickness and mortality? Scarcity of material goods? Humans as the most intelligent beings? How very 20th century!

Our history has not prepared us for these changes, Our cultures, ideologies and religions provide no answers to many of the new questions we are faced with. Trying to impose old world views or ways of doing things on a new world is a recipe for failure, whether you are a company, government or individual.

On the second day of HAR2009 a copyright debate was held between the entertainment industry and the hacker community at HAR2009 in the Netherlands. Tim Kuijk very bravely represented the views of the entertainment industry while Walter van Holst and myself put forth a range of contrarian views and Prof.dr Wilfred Dolfsma moderated us and a full Monty Hall of hackers. Because of some slight historic animosity between hackers and the entertainment industry we made a real effort to keep everything civilised. Since no tomatoes were see flying or Godwin's law invocations were required I think we succeeded. I've stated my personal views on copyright in the 21st century on various occasions on this blog.

On the second day of HAR2009 a copyright debate was held between the entertainment industry and the hacker community at HAR2009 in the Netherlands. Tim Kuijk very bravely represented the views of the entertainment industry while Walter van Holst and myself put forth a range of contrarian views and Prof.dr Wilfred Dolfsma moderated us and a full Monty Hall of hackers. Because of some slight historic animosity between hackers and the entertainment industry we made a real effort to keep everything civilised. Since no tomatoes were see flying or Godwin's law invocations were required I think we succeeded. I've stated my personal views on copyright in the 21st century on various occasions on this blog.

Had fun doing talk this afternoon at HAR2009. While I was taking a nap afterward someone wrote a very nice review on the HAR wiki.

I re-iterated many of the points I made at the CCC-conference in Berlin. My main points were also written down in english in a recent interview with the Indian Center for Internet & Society.

To spice things up a bit I added a new aspect about areas of public sector IT that should be under ultimate control by public sector organisations. I'm still refining these ideas but this is the gist of it:

In modern nations many laws and policies are implemented through software and supporting computer systems. Control over these systems is therefore control over the functioning of the state and its laws. A democratic government should therefore have total control over critical information processing functions, on behalf of its citizens. Having access to the sourcecode and the right to compile it into working binaries is a crucial part of this control. Examples of area's of application are voting tabulation, national defense&security, the police- and justice system, power grids, water and sewage systems, Air-traffic, harbour and transport control systems and the national media. Opensourcing these critical government applications and supporting systems is therefore a required step for continued national sovereignty.