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- From: David Tannenbaum <david.tannenbaum worcester.oxford.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 23:05:01 +0000
Hi all,
I've just started working with an organization called the Union for the
Public Domain that is organizing to preserve the public domain in a
broad range of sectors. A few volunteers are working to create tools for
online organizing, and I was wondering if anyone on this list might be
interested in helping?
More on the organization... The Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a
non-profit membership organization whose mission is to protect and
enhance the public domain in matters concerning intellectual property.
UPD has a very broad mission and we plan to work on a whole swathe of
issues, from software, to access to textbooks, to webcasting, to
essential medicines. There are a lot of groups working on these issues
now, but they rarely leverage each other's power in numbers. We are
hoping to build some coordination.
The other goal is to broaden the circle of activists working on IP, to
include the more general public, which is affected by IP law and threats
to the public domain, but doesn't really understand either enough to
care (yet). We want to make the issues palatable so people understand
them, and create a "politics of IP," much like there is now a politics
of environmentalism.
The board of directors as it stands now includes Richard Stallman, Jamie
Love, who runs a group called the Consumer Project on Technology, Robin
Gross of IP Justice and Robert Weissman. The group was first started
approximately 8 years ago, but has been dormant for nearly as long, and
I've been hired part-time to restart it. We need all the help we can get.
We have a website (http://www.public-domain.org) and a listserve, but
not much else at this point. We want to be as creative as possible in
using online tools to mobilize the grassroots. The most pressing
projects are:
- Setting up a database of members, volunteers, media outlets, allies,
that would be accessible via a web interface, and could do things like
generate action alerts to members based on their geographical location
and other relevant characteristics. We are likely to use Perl and MySQL
to do this.
- Setting up tools that let people send an e-mail to the relevant
"target" (their EU representative; WIPO country delegate, etc).
- Setting up a mechanism for accepting donations, whether that means
going through a third party or processing them ourself.
All of the resulting software, scripts, etc, will be free.
If anyone is interested in collaborating on these projects, you can
e-mail me off list at davidt public-domain.org. I'm based in Oxford and
would love to meet people in person as well.
Yours,
David
--
David Tannenbaum
Coordinator
Union for the Public Domain
davidt public-domain.org
http://www.public-domain.org
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