Talking on Copyright at ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam, April 9th.

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If you're in or near Amsterdam in the second week of April, come on over to ApacheCon EU [1], the 2008 European conference of the Apache Software Foundation. There are a lot of interesting speakers and sessions going on, not all of them technical (for example, "Open Source Business in Europe" by Arje Cahn).

I'll be giving a talk entitled Creation Myths: Three Centuries of Open Source and Copyright [2], on Wednesday, 9 April, at 5:30pm. It's about the similarities between today's open source movement and the creative world of the pre-copyright era, how copyright and centralized distribution gradually changed the nature of creativity, and how open source and decentralized distribution are changing it back again — but with some new twists. (This is an updated version of a talk [3] I gave last summer at OSS2007 in Ireland.) We'll also look at some non-software business models based on unrestricted information flow and collaboration.

Slides are here: OpenOffice.org (ODP) [4], Adobe PDF [5], Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) [6].