Moderator: Nahla Rizk, AUC
Edward Felten, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy
Information technologies: how do we use technology and provide active engagement with the technology to help people know how to engage. How did people build their technology? by ripping it apart and learning it – tinkering with technology. Then have a community with whom they can talk and work on the product. It is a social activity that engages people in the technology.
How can public policy encourage that? success of open source technology. Is OS technology an alternative business model to proprietary software? yes. It is a space that provides ability to tinker.
As for mobile phones which is the primary mode of access to ICT in much of the developing world. There is tension bet open and closed models and that is seen everywhere. Open source provides tech playground but offers also opportunity in becoming collaborative and engaged. But there is a tension over this kind of tinkering in the intellectual properties movement.
It is possible to reconcile open source and intellectual property. Some sort of protection for tinkering is important. We can foster competition. When you make technology accessible then it makes sense to the setting it is in.
Ronaldo Lemos, Center for Technology & Society, FGV-Rio
A law for the internet that can set the ground for innovation and not be repressive. It is a civil rights based law – it is using the law and also using the internet to write that law collaboratively.
Privacy, freedom of speech, rights of access [as a human right], safeharbors [what is your liability], net neutrality, open gvt data. Did not include copyright bec it has its own process.
Creating a new collective right/interest: net neutrality, decentralization etc. so that public prosecutors can sue on behalf of internet users.
Katherine Strandburg, New York University School of Law
Open source is important especially to developing countries because they have more control over it rather than be controlled and held hostage to software companies.
