EC erects toll booth for Microsoft’s open source rivals - The Register explains why the EU ruling, while seemingly bad for Microsoft because they have to pay a lot of money, is actually bad for the free software movement because it says that Microsoft has the right to “remuneration” for use of their APIs. The EU should have skipped the fine and instead made Microsoft place these APIs in the public domain. Greedy bastards. The EU ruling may actually have made us less free than we were before. I personally advocate the use of NGOs and grassroots movements to fight corporate excesses rather than regulatory solutions (Luke may disagree). This is a perfect example of why we can’t let the government fight our battles for us; if you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.

Our friends at Downhill Battle have launched yet another wonderful project, BannedMusic.org. The basic idea is that when record companies try to use copyright law or other methods to suppress music, it will be counterproductive because the music will then appear on BannedMusic.org and Downhill Battle will talk about it in the press, which will result in it spreading like wildfire across peer-to-peer networks, just as the Grey Album did. In order to promote distributed filesharing, DHB has provided a nice little application so that when you go to download a banned album from their website, it will automatically install Bittorrent for you and automatically download the requested album through Bittorrent. It’s a brilliant idea, and I think we’ll see increased use of Bittorrent because of this. Unfortunately, Swarthmore College has blocked Bittorrent on our campus (there WILL be an SCDC campaign in the future to unblock Bittorrent), but all of you out in the free world can benefit :-)

The buzz about the project is already starting. Free culture activists around the world like Brian Flemming are spreading the word through the blogosphere… why don’t you help out with viral marketing? Tell your friends about BannedMusic.org! The internet grapevine is awesome.

Hey folks, we’re really excited about attending the Internet Commons Congress tomorrow… Nelson Pavlosky of the SCDC (that’s me!) will be speaking on the Digital Democracy panel from 10:30-11:30am Eastern time on Thursday. You can listen to the audio webcast of the conference today and tomorrow, these are Icecast streams that should play fine in Winamp or XMMS. So what are you waiting for? Tune in :-D

It’s a lot of fun reading the weblogs of all the other people who are attending the conference… Frederick Emrich of info-commons.org, like us, will be going to Lessig’s book release/signing party afterwards, where we hope to meet and talk to as many of the activists in the free culture movement as we can. It’s a rare opportunity to find these awesome folks all in one place on the east coast, and we’ll make the most of it. We’ll be handing out flyers announcing FreeCulture.org, in hopes that with the help of conference attendees we can get the site and the movement launched that much quicker. If you’re reading this, and you’d like to help out, drop us a line!

Ren Bucholz at the EFF has created a diagram that explains voluntary collective licensing in one elegant screenful.

The first version of the Free Culture Manifesto is up on the freeculture.org wiki. It’s adapted from the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons Manifesto, which has been around for a while now.

The idea is essentially this: technology offers us a new and liberating way to connect to each other. There’s no need to be passive consumers of information any more. There’s no need to pay people like the RIAA to control our culture. There’s a potential for people to interact with society in more ways that aren’t mediated by consumption. Here’s the manifesto.

Free Culture Manifesto, v1.0

The mission of the Free Culture movement is to reclaim our culture from corporate control. Our goal is to defend free and open cultural space and protect public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation.

We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism where we do not actually own the products we buy, but we are merely granted limited uses of them as long as we pay the rent. We must halt and reverse the recent radical expansion of intellectual property rights, which has reached the point where they trump any and all other rights of the consumer and society.

We believe that culture is a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not sit at the end of a one-way media tube and buy things until we look like the people on Friends; with the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.

We will fight to make everyone understand the value of our common wealth, evangelizing for Linux and the open-source model. We will resist repressive legislation like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which threatens our civil liberties and stifles innovation. We will organize to prevent Microsoft and others from pushing through hardware-level monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their own machines and their own data.

We won’t allow the RIAA and the MPAA to cling to obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation and market dominance. We will be active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production, made possible for a brief instant by the technology of the Internet, before it is locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a top-down, corporate intranet — if we allow the old paradigm of creation and distribution to reassert itself — then that window of opportunity will have been closed, and we will have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.

The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.

You know that we’re really onto something when the metaphors that we use to explain the concepts of free culture and the digital commons actually start to take on literal truth in the physical world. Here’s how I like to explain the difference between free/open source software and proprietary software (a metaphor that I’ve adapted from sources such as Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line):

When you buy a computer that runs Windows, it’s like buying a car with the hood welded shut. There’s no way to tell what is under the hood. There could be a car bomb under the hood, or a leaking gas line, but there is no way for you to tell until the car explodes. A computer running open source software is like a normal car, where you can open the hood and look inside, and identify problems yourself. Even if you’re clueless about cars, you can at least change the oil, and if you’re a car hobbyist you can tinker with it, replace parts, or even hot rod the car. If you don’t have the time or knowledge to fix your own car, you can take a normal car to your mechanically inclined neighbor, or any car repair shop in the nation. With a Microsoft car with the hood welded shut, only Microsoft can diagnose and fix your problems; you have to take it to the Microsoft dealer. If Microsoft provides crappy service, that’s just too bad for you, they have a monopoly on fixing your car. Open source gives you choices. People would resent Microsoft wielding this kind of control over their car: why is it acceptable for their computers?

I’ve been using this metaphor for a while now to explain one of the benefits of the open source philosophy (choice) when it is applied to computers, but I never imagined that there was a real danger that our cars would become “proprietary”, so that only the official dealer can fix them.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

As our cars become more computerized, the battle between proprietary, closed structures and free, open structures, between Microsoft’s worldview and the Linux worldview, expands into the automotive market. As mentioned on Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker, car companies are closing off the computer interfaces that mechanics need to repair cars, and it’s destroying the business of independent mechanics.

We are standing at a critical turning point in history: either the system of proprietary control will expand to engulf everything that digital technology touches, or digital technology will result in an flourishing Internet Renaissance, where ideas can travel freely, and people are independent because they are able to help one another. It will be a sad day when we cannot help our neighbors, and when we need help we can only turn to the corporate machine and consume, consume, consume. Your iPod battery died? Buy a new iPod. Your computer has bugs and viruses? Buy the next version of Windows, we swear it’ll be more secure this time. You’re not healthy? Don’t worry about your lousy diet, just take an Aspirin and go to bed. A culture of passive consumerism is a culture of passing the buck, of refusing to accept personal responsibility.

This anti-consumerism meme may sound old and hackneyed, but the internet offers us the opportunity to actually make a change. The internet allows two-way communication to become cheaper, easier, and more convenient than ever before. We can communicate with one another in a peer-to-peer fashion, and it’s becoming easier to participate in society and culture instead of sitting on the sidelines. The position of the mere spectator is becoming harder to defend as a morally acceptable position. When it costs nothing to publish, why shouldn’t you speak with your own voice? When running an alternative to Microsoft Windows costs you nothing, and organizations like FreeCulture.org are willing to hold your hand as you take your first baby steps into the world of Linux, are you really so lazy that you can’t give it a spin? When your information sources are no longer restricted to a few channels of television, how many times can you turn your head and pretend that you just don’t see? It’s easy to be informed now, and it’s easy to band together with people from around the world and take action. It’s just hard to change habits. But it’s vital that we do change our habits, if we are to avoid a world of alienation from one another and passive withdrawal into ourselves.

That’s why we need to build a culture of freedom. When all of your habits promote freedom, and you join together with others and build a community of freedom, and other people do the same thing around the country and around the world, the result is a Free Culture. Maybe you can help us make this happen at FreeCulture.org.

In a digital world where making copies of artistic productions costs nothing, how can artists make money? What are the alternatives to totalitarian control over copying technology? One excellent business model is the Digital Art Auction, which sets a fair market price for the good before it is released into the wild. This is a good fit for open source projects, which have to be freely distributable after release, but which may never reach completion without adequate funding. There is an awesome site in development right now called Openware Games, which will support the production of open source computer games using the Digital Art Auction business model! I can’t wait for this site to really get rolling…

There is also the wonderful Magnatune of course. (They are not evil.) The founder John Buckman just started a Magnatune weblog, which looks like it will be good reading. I’m adding it to my Bloglines subscriptions at least :-) John’s latest post demonstrates the refreshing logic of free culture, in the face of the dinosaurian psychology of a major label executive. I’d like to think that John’s wife Jan made that executive rethink his position a little bit, but I fear that the old guard may be too set in their ways to truly change their minds. Then again, IBM is now a major force behind Linux, who would have thought? Once upon a time, they were the evil empire! Sane executives can’t argue with a winning business model. Unfortunately, the business world is not completely sane. Fortunately, those who cannot evolve and deal with reality will die off… unless they manage to prop themselves up with monopoly power and bad laws. Bad laws! Bad!

Well, it’s about time we got this blog rolling! In order to get an idea of what sort of things a Free Culture blog should cover, I’ve been watching the search feed for “free culture” on my Bloglines.com account, and interesting reading it has been indeed. Most of the posts refer to Lessig and his new book, and the hoopla surrounding that. Lessig is also giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y in New York on March 23 called Free Culture: Creativity and Its Enemies, which turned up a lot of hits, and which you should definitely attend if you are in NYC that day! A number of blogs, as epitomized by Tikun Olam - Make the World a Better Place, discuss the NYTimes article The Tyranny of Copyright, which mentions the SCDC’s actions, although without naming names. All of this is really wonderful stuff, but it’s not really helping me blog…

Although I’m proud to be among the small group of students who are kind of spearheading this movement, it’s really lonely out in front here. I’d love to meet other free culture activists from around the world, and I’d love to see other students joining in from different time zones and different latitudes. I’d like to see a community grow around this website. Because this site was created for you, after all…

Edit the Wiki! Leave comments! Join the IRC channel at #freeculture on freenode.net! Together we can indeed make the world a better place :-)

If you’re in the Washington DC area on March 24-25, you should definitely attend the Internet Commons Congress! It will be an excellent opportunity for free culture activists to network with one another, and there are going to be a lot of panelists there who are important in the movement, including people from the EFF, Richard Stallman (through videoconferencing) of the FSF, New Yorkers for Fair Use, meetup.com, the Gutenberg Project, IPJustice, SourceForge, Center for the Public Domain, the Prometheus Radio Project… and many more undoubtedly amazing people who I am less familiar with. We hope to see you there!

Observe Nelson’s vast posting powers! And check out Nelson’s homepage, it’s cool, really.