- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 9th July 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
-Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
-recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
-country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
-this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
-to adjust and scale the just released
-<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
-Wheezy</a> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
-happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
-the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
-background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
-"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
-Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
-in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
-just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
-perspective when working with IT.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
-now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
-time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
-a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
-K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
-seriously into Skolelinux instead.
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
-distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
-integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
-administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
-based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
-well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
-when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
-showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
-mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
-same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
-setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
-workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
-thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
-convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
-projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
-small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
-have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
-clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
-old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
-nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
-comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
-such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
-quicker to update.
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
-we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
-year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
-sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
-to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
-a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
-
-<p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
-install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
-distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
-That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
-Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
-to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
-support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
-software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
-need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
-some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
-run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
-education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
-by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
-education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
-are done. This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
-
-<p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
-magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
-market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
-world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
-to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
-are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
-edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
-there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
-
-<p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
-the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
-Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
-Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
-tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
-program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
-studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
-want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
-things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
-have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
-fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
-one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
-because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
-sound file.</p>
-
-<p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
-will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
-they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
-look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
-programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
-as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
-program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
-learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
-the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
-only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
-to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
-)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
-source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
-it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
-flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
-will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
-students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
-clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
-idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
-the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
-open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
-problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
-will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
-support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
-desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
-level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
-useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
-article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
-management with Airtime</a>,
-<a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
-claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
-<a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
-be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
-useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a></div>
+ <div class="date">17th November 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>While working on a
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
+translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
+which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
+creativity, one idea occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax
+office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
+make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
+
+<p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
+<a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
+-15-30-19-00/">presentation
+by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
+in writing for a wider audience. The idea is not really based on the
+argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
+core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
+holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
+controlled by the citizens in a country. I'm sharing the idea here to
+let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
+arguments.</p>
+
+<p>Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in
+Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
+the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
+stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value
+of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
+taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have
+value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
+work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Why not?</p>
+
+<p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
+maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
+rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
+value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such
+database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
+for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
+hard operation with todays copyright law. To ensure that copyright
+holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
+requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
+copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
+correct right holder.</p>
+
+<p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
+they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
+the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
+one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
+database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
+use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
+work. Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
+tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
+tax calculation. I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
+allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
+allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain. The
+existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
+and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
+would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
+
+<p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
+get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
+domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
+
+<p>Why have such taxing not happened yet? I am sure the tax office
+would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
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