Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Intellectual property

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Intellectual property
  • Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:19:52 -0500

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

It is hit and miss, nothing engraved in stone. A book is written to sell for income or it is written and made available for free to the public or the for-profit work is converted to a freebie after a time. Its all up to the author and noone else. Its a time tested proven system. Just because its the digital age and it is easy to put any work online doesn't give anyone the right to do so without the author's permission.

Facts of life; works will be pirated and put online anyway. Useful for those who can access them. If this happened open ended fewer authors would write for a living and less good works would be available to help
sustain our collective knowledgebase.

Some who take from the pool of pirated as well as open source/public domain literature benefit greatly and give back to the world works of equal or greater value. In your case reading PII was a life changing experience and because of that you will make a significant contribution to the global permaculture pool of knowledge.

Have you visited the Soil and Health Library, Steve Solomon's magnum opus? http://www.soilandhealth.org/

If enough people feel strongly enough that Mollison't PDM should be made available to anyone who wants it for free then why don't those folks
absorb the content of PDM, synthesize it, add new and uptodate reference material then publish it for free on the web. I don't see why this should be a particularly daunting task. After all, much of the text in PDM could be condensed dramatically and transformed into something new;
add modern graphics, sound, video, embedded web links and external references and an extensive bibliography and you'd have made a good start at creating the Global Permaculture Community's Manual of Design,
or some other title.

There is so much free material online to work with now that is underutilized. I fear that some of it may disappear for lack of encouragement to its host and author, or lack of funds or other valid reason. Upshot, its high time that these resources are identified, documented, copied with permission and preserved through some sort of portal website. The various permaculture database projects that have
emerged in this list purported to do something like that. Start simply and build. A permapedia like the PC Wikipedia entry is good but much more and greater diversity of content is needed. How to put something like this together, where to start? a blog, a wiki, a website? This list's archives contain a ton of useful information; even my meager website and blog has much material, some unique. Paul's permies.com
is another, permaculture.info made a good beginning but faltered because
not enough people had coadmin access to keep it maintained and moving forward. I am thinking of a giant permaculture portal website for starters. A wiki is useful for this because you can create a heirarchy of subjects with infinite subsets.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page