What is stated under our press releases
ScriptumLibre works on creating awareness of the economic and social meaning of free knowledge and culture for our society. ScriptumLibre fulfills a protecting and promoting role. On the one hand free information ensures more competition and better market working because monopoly shaping is reduced. On the other hand, free knowledge and free culture offer unhindered access to that information, and that serves the development of mankind directly. Moreover ScriptumLibre is concerned about the erosion of privacy by legislators. ScriptumLibre cooperates internationally with the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, Free Software Foundation Europe, Project Gutenberg, European Digital Rights and a lot of other organisations.
What is the ScriptumLibre.org Initiative?
Article 2 of the articles of association gives an answer to the question what the non profit organization ScriptumLibre.org actually wants (summarized):
- The main objective of the foundation is stimulating and protecting digital publishable goods with a free (as in freedom) character.
- The foundation tries to achieve this goal by developing public and political awareness about:
- The value of the ancient culture of developing, public sharing and re-using economic efforts
- The value of what is called the Public Domain
Property
- Books become public domain 70 years after the author dies and by then don't have a proprietary character anymore. Volunteers of Project Gutenberg translate such books to computer text to make them accessible for everyone via the internet.
- Comparable, software can be divided into non-free, like software from Microsoft, and free, like Free Software and Open Source software.
- At schools often books are used from publishers having a non free character, but there are also free books with a different license giving those books a free character. The FreE-learning Project, focuses on stimulating free educational content, trying to establish a historical turning point for education.
Explanation
The ScriptumLibre.org foundation stimulates and protects digital creations with a free character. The former French premier Rocard, who is now chairman of the EU culture commission, said: "A civilization should be preserved where the place of the world outside the market and of the human intellect is respected.". The old social culture of developing and sharing in order to benefit us all, transferred from universities to the internet, deserves attention because of both ethical and economical reasons. Because we think this is very important we even mentioned it in our articles of association.
The power of the Public Domain
Freedom of information, freedom to copy and improve ideas, the freedom to drink from that huge well called Public Domain for thousands, even millions of years, brought some of us prosperity and many of us a chance for a better life without poverty.
Copy and improve, copy and improve... This is what we call progression. We learned to talk by copying behavior. We learned to write by copying the alphabet which happens to be public domain and not just someone's property. The existence of the public domain is, just like freedom, so normal that we are not even aware of it.
But dark forces, greed driven organizations, see owning information as a tool to become dangerously powerful. They are lobbying day after day in governments and they want you to believe that copying is illegal and bad. This is a threat to mankind. It is a lie. Free people, it is our duty to counter them and to create awareness.
"Hey, that is my idea!" Wrong. Ideas are free. It is also not our idea, it is not owned at all. Even if you've patented it you have nothing more than a right granted to you by the king, limiting the freedom of information, and it must therefore be a real invention of incredible economical interest!
ScriptumLibre.org tries to achieve her objectives by
- development of public awareness and cherishing the culture of developing, public sharing and beneficial effects of this for our society;
- offering a digital environment, unhindered accessible via the internet, where people can develop, communicate and publish...
Unfortunately it is sometimes hard, yes even impossible, to achieve our objectives. Insane software patents are dangerous for us (and for SME's and consumers). Some software giants don't seem to like Free (Open Source) Software and many publishers see us as threatening while in the US there are publishers earning their living by simply publishing free content.
This forces us to defend ourselves just like now with the EU-directive about software patents. Informing politicians and media has become an important task of ScriptumLibre.org.
Many users of Free Software are aware of the idealistic approach and efforts of many volunteering developers, but their opinions get stuck in e-mails and local mailing lists and the desire to do something back often ends up in frustration.
So this is an invitation to do something with your opinion end to take care to disclose it on this place, to contact politicians, to work on free educational content, etc..