Calendar

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Dec
18
Thu
Book Talk: The Public Domain @ Online
Dec 18 @ 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Book Talk: The Public Domain

Book Talk: The Public Domain

Free

By Internet Archive

Online event

Overview

Join James Boyle with Molly Shaffer Van Houweling on why protecting our cultural commons is essential for creativity and innovation.

Why the public domain is vitally important and what we must do to protect it

In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age—today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today’s policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation.

Boyle identifies as a major problem the widespread failure to understand the importance of the public domain—the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee. The public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the realm of material protected by intellectual property rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it. With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, synthetic biology and Internet file sharing, this timely book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates. If we continue to enclose the “commons of the mind,” Boyle argues, we will all be the poorer.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Berkeley Law faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling’s teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and food law.

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Pack the Port! Stop the Oakland Airport’s killer cargo flights!
Dec 18 @ 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
You are invited to give public comment and join this signal thread for live updates:  https://signal.group/#CjQKIFaN9zAo5UKJYw4vGxiUFEGnR2MZyQNJdzkHeQYkCztCEhDepXwlMXidQapXwHE5DD2b
DEC 18 @3 PM: PACK THE PORT TO STOP OAKLAND’S COMPLICITY IN GENOCIDE!

It’s been 4 months since we exposed killer cargo flying out of Oakland Airport and Oakland’s leaders still have done nothing.
Join us for a protest and port meeting to demand the port authority stop allowing weapon components to leave from OAK. Bring noisemakers and friends as we set the tone for public comment to follow. We’ll pack the room to demand: Ending Israeli military cargo shipments flying out of Oakland’s civilian airport.

SEE YOU THURSDAY DEC 18! TAKE ACTION: armsembargonow.com

pack the port.jpg

https://acgreens.wordpress.com/
Express your green ideas and “like” us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/greenpartyofalamedacounty/

Participation and/or donations appreciated!  https://acgreens.wordpress.com/donate/
FLIER to print, post, distribute please:
https://acgreens.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/gpcaac_gs.png

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Dec
20
Sat
@ Oakland Home Depot
Dec 20 @ 10:00 am – 12:30 pm

Across the country, ICE agents are escalating violence against immigrant workers in Home Depot stores and parking lots. These enforcement operations are chaotic, traumatic, and sometimes deadly.

Just last week in Oregon, agents forcibly abducted a man inside a Home Depot as onlookers called them cowards. In August, in Monrovia, CA, Carlos Roberto Montoya – a Guatemalan day laborer – was killed while fleeing an ICE operation at a Home Depot store.

These attacks are happening on Home Depot property, under Home Depot’s watch, and with Home Depot’s silence. The company has taken no public steps to condemn these raids or to demand that the government stop carrying out enforcement actions at its stores. Home Depot Co-Founder Bernie Marcus amassed billions from an industry built on immigrant labor –  only to funnel millions into Trump’s xenophobbic campaigns.

In Oakland, day laborers face the threat of ICE while Home Depot refuses to provide them with a safe place to seek work, banning them from parking lots and denying them basic dignity and respect.

Home Depot has ignored the harm for far too long. We will not. As ICE escalates its attacks, we are escalating our response.

From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, people nationwide said, “We Ain’t Buying it,” withheld their dollars, and took aim at Home Depot and other key corporate targets for collaborating with ICE and the MAGA agenda.

This Super Saturday – the final major shopping day before the holidays – we’re keeping the pressure on and gathering near Oakland Home Depot on 12/20 from 10:00am � 12:30pm to say, EEnough is enough. RSVP for more info on location details.

Join us to demand that Home Depot immediately:

  • Publicly condemn ICE raids.
  • Stop cooperating with ICE – close stores and parking lots to ICCE agents.
  • Negotiate with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to protect workers and customers from attacks.
  • Help detained victims and support their families.
  • Release security video and other footage of enforcement actions at Home Depot stores

Through its silence and inaction, Home Depot has become ICE’s passive partner. Every raid on its properties deepens fear in our communities.

Stand with us to reject ICE terror and demand real protections – not corporate silence.

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Jan
3
Sat
Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: What’s Left – 3 Paths Through the Planetary Crisis @ Online
Jan 3 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.  All are welcome!

For our December, 2025 meeting we will be reading and discussing the first two chapters of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by Malcolm Harris (Amazon) (Hatchette).  For our January meeting we will finish the book.

A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling progressive intellectual Malcolm Harris—“a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture).

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What’s Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Vital and transformative, What’s Left confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Our first book was  Doughnut Economics, and our most recent books were The Age of Insecurity and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals”. For the rest of our reading list see here.

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