User:Slowking4/congressional briefing agenda

Wikipedia Congress Briefing

Rationale:

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in light of the blackout, there is a need for follow up briefings of Congress, keeping in mind that they are an older generation. education campaign on general principles, not any specific legislation. typically small groups could brief staff of members of congress, targeting committees, or volunteers’ member.

Timeline

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  • training March 30, 2013, 3:30 pm- 6:30pm - note new time
  • briefings April 1, 2013 10-5 PM

Resources

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Suggested brief:

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What is wikipedia?

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w:Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki [1]

What is open source?

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In the late 20th century, cultural practitioners began to adopt the intellectual property licensing techniques of free software and open-source software to make their work more freely available to others, including the Creative Commons.

In contrast to free culture, proponents of open-source culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods and ends.

One way of achieving the goal of making cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. In keeping with Moore's law's prediction about processors, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late 20th Century. Consequently, the marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero. Combined with an explosive growth in personal computer and technology ownership, the result is an increase in general population's access to digital media. This phenomenon facilitated growth in open-source culture because it allowed for rapid and inexpensive duplication and distribution of culture. [2]

What is copyright, and how does this interact with public domain?

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w:Copyright initially was conceived as a way for government to restrict printing; the contemporary intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them. Most jurisdictions recognize copyright limitations, allowing "fair" exceptions to the creator's exclusivity of copyright, and giving users certain rights.

The development of digital media and computer network technologies have prompted reinterpretation of these exceptions, introduced new difficulties in enforcing copyright, and inspired additional challenges to copyright law's philosophic basis. Simultaneously, businesses with great economic dependence upon copyright have advocated the extension and expansion of their copy rights, and sought additional legal and technological enforcement. [3]

Wikipedia & GLAM

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The GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums with Wikipedia) helps cultural institutions share their resources with the world through high-impact collaboration alongside experienced Wikipedia editors. It is an unparalled opportunity for the custodians of our cultural heritage to present their collections to new audiences.

Wikipedia gets millions of page views per day, has more than 250 language versions, and includes more than 20 million articles. Its content is created and maintained by thousands of dedicated volunteer “Wikipedians” around the globe. Everyone from academic researchers to amateur genealogists to young students uses Wikipedia to find information and resources. By 2015, Wikipedia is projected to serve 1 billion people with over 50 million articles.

The Wikipedia community is eager to help institutions improve online articles about their collections. A Wikipedian in Residence can be assigned to a specific cultural institution to help plan and coordinate ways that they can broaden their presence on Wikipedia. Activities organized by Wikipedians in Residence are broad and varied, and could include direct content improvement in partnership with curators, coordination of image or multimedia donations, organizing visits/events (e.g. behind the scenes tours for Wikipedians), and organizing challenges and competitions that promote article improvement.

These mutually beneficial relationships facilitate the sharing of resources between GLAMs and Wikipedia as part of a long-term ongoing collaboration. [4]

Backround

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not in brief but be prepared to answer questions

Aaron's law

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Lofgren called her proposal "Aaron's Law." The core of Lofgren's proposal is to make the violation of an online service’s user agreement (commonly referred to as "terms of service") a non-criminal activity. She underscored the importance of reforming a law that dates back to 1986 and one that's being harshly critiqued.

"The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute," wrote Lofgren. "It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute." [5]

SOPA

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the websites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the websites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.[6]

What is DNS?

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The w:Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.

By design, all domain name servers world-wide should contain identical lists; with the blocking changes proposed, servers inside the United States would have records different from their global counterparts, making URLs less universal.

One concern expressed by network experts is that hackers would offer workarounds to private users to allow access to government-seized sites, but these workarounds might also jeopardize security by redirecting unsuspecting users to scam websites. Supporters of the bill, such as the MPAA, have argued that widespread circumvention of the filtering would be unlikely.

Users might go to unregulated alternative DNS systems, and hindering the government from conducting legitimate Internet regulation. MAFIAAFire Redirector, a software extension for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers, redirects links from domains that have been seized by governments to backup sites, in order to bypass the blocking. The software is open source. [7]

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"It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) — aka “Six Strikes” — has finally launched. CAS is an agreement between major media corporations and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe — via everything from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds." Daniel Nazer, EFF