Late this week, the European Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure will thank Poland over 28,000 times.

Why? Without getting too bogged down in the details, basically, Poland has twice steered the European Union away from accepting the patentability of software. Turning back the tide in the EU is good for all of us.

There are several reasons to oppose software patents. Here are a few:

• Software patents threaten open source software: “The extension of patent law to the field of software represents a fundamental threat to the open-source development model.” - Kiel Institute for World Economics [source]
• Software patents threaten software development and innovation in general: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today (1991).” - Bill Gates [source]
• Software patents are disproportionately harmful to smaller companies and independent programmers: “A software patent regime would establish the law of the strong, and ultimately create more injustice than justice.” - Linus Torvalds, Michael Widenius and Rasmus Lerdorf [source]
• Patent offices have a poor track record in judging non-obviousness and prior art: “The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called ‘prior art’) is widely distributed and poorly documented.” - Electronic Frontier Foundation [source]

So, over 28,000 individuals have signed a letter thanking Poland for trying to keep software patents out of the EU. Late this week, the FFII intends to formally hand over the letter and its signatures. So sign on now, and next time you’re in Poland, find the Ministry of Science and Information Technology and say “Thanks.”

Free Culture groups, why not partner with a Polish or European student group to publicly discuss software patents and the status of new member states in the EU?

In the end, we all lose from software patents. To quote the Free Software Foundation: “Most software developers, as well as users, lose from software patents, which do more to obstruct software progress than to encourage it.”

For more information about software patents, see:

• NoSoftwarePatents.com
• FFII’s Software Patents site
• EFF’s Patent Busting Project
• League for Programming Freedom’s Software Patents site

Addendum: A few days later, Linus Torvalds is in the news again opposing software patents.

Downhill Battle’s Eyes on the Screen is being forced to take a new shape: After being contacted by lawyers for Blackside, Inc., owners of Eyes, Downhill Battle has taken down their torrent links to the film.

As a consequence, the amount of people with access to Eyes returns to the lucky whose local library has a VHS copy, or those with enough foresight to download a copy while the torrents were still available. We expect the number of possible screenings across the country to decline dramatically from what it could have been.

Of course, Blackside legally can ask Downhill Battle to take down their torrents. Of course, it’s still not legal to publicly show Eyes, since it includes archival footage it no longer has the rights to. But in the end, all that really matters is that a piece of our history is locked away from us.

Free Culture groups may still choose to hold a “community showing” of the film. But you may want to re-write your introduction.

Last week, media attention nationwide focused on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Americans asked themselves, “How far have we come? Has his dream been realized? What does it mean today? What do today’s youth know about the history that allows them today’s opportunities?”

Some in the media took notice of Eyes on the Prize, an award-winning series of documentaries on the civil rights movement. Today, the 1987 series could be a powerful tool to examine the past and forge ahead into the future — if anyone could see them. The only surviving copies, the VHS tapes owned by schools and libraries, are wearing out. These tapes are irreplaceable, literally: licensing disputes over archival footage used in the film prevent it from being re-released.

Leave it to the fine folks at Downhill Battle to scheme up a solution.

Of course, one solution would be to raise the funds to re-buy rights to the archival footage (if the owners were willing to sell). Some are exploring that possibility.

The permanent solution would be a better licensing system that makes it easier and more affordable for filmmakers (and others) to acquire the rights to archival footage and photographs.

Downhill Battle has something more immediate, more powerful, more simple than that, however: Downhill Battle has p2p.

Earlier this week, Downhill Battle launched Eyes on the Screen, calling on anyone with access to the tapes to show them on Feb. 8 at 8 p.m., in recognition of Black History Month. Don’t have a copy? Download it.

Free Culture groups across the country plan to participate. You’re welcome to, too. See if there’s a screening in your area. If not, organize one. Check your local or school library, or download a copy. (If downloading, at your discretion, you may wish to talk to your school’s general counsel. Downhill Battle thinks it’s fair use, but your school may not agree. We won’t dictate a path for you to take.) When you post your screening on the Web site so visitors can find out about it, let people know that the screening is organized by your Free Culture group.

For an even bigger audience, partner with your local NAACP or Black Student Union. We’re sure they’d like to know.

When you screen the film, give a brief introduction to the legal issues surrounding the film and why the current system doesn’t work well. It’s a great chance to tell people about the problems and inefficiencies in our current copyright regime.

The Eyes on the Screen Web site has loads more information. Best of luck to you!

Today saw the release of two excellent articles on free culture. The first comes to us from KeystonePolitics.com and is an in-depth interview with our co-founder, Nelson Pavlosky. Nelson does a great job connecting free culture issues, making it clear that these issues aren’t merely about technology:

Ultimately, I believe that our movement should encompass everyone who wants to be more than a passive observer, a passive consumer. If you believe that culture should be a two-way conversation and not just something that we absorb like so many sponges, then this movement is for you. If democracy depends on an informed and active citizenry, then you could say that we’re working towards a truly democratic culture.

Check out the entire interview here.

The second article of the day is actually the first installment of Nelson’s new tri-weekly column for the Swarthmore Phoenix. And while The Phoenix is a local student paper, something tells me Nelson’s columns will remain relevant to all of us. His first piece already deals with the issue of network freedom, which affects us all, regardless of if we get our Internet access from our College or our local cable provider.

Articles like these are vital to the Free Culture movement; with each exposure more people become aware of the importance of free culture issues. We face an up-hill battle educating our peers and fellow citizens on these topics, but no matter how challenging that path may be, the alternative — doing nothing — will always remain unconscionable.

It’s also always good to remember that you don’t need to be a syndicated columnist to get in the newspaper. We can all write letters to the editor, and, should those fail to be published, we all have the capacity to start our own blogs.

Remember: Be the media!

In today’s Gainesville (Fla.) Sun, the article UF file-sharing ban meets opposition explores the controversy over the University of Florida’s ICARUS anti-filesharing software, including our perspective. It’s an interesting article, and rather accurate on the whole; it almost gets our side right.

ICARUS, the Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services, was developed at Florida and installed on the residential (dorm) network in summer 2003. Through a combination of port-blocking and traffic analysis, ICARUS blocks access to peer-to-peer software for the roughly 9,000 students living on campus. Installed after p2p caused “traffic jams” both in the network’s bandwidth and in the student judicial system, ICARUS’ creators have largely considered it successful at limiting these concerns.

We can understand why the university would want to relieve that burden from themselves. But ICARUS places a heavy load on the students, as well. By indiscriminately blocking access to p2p software, ICARUS throws out the baby with the bath water: legal as well as illegal uses are struck down. A student who needs access to a p2p network for material for a class is out of luck. It’d be like banning VCRs because they could be used for copyright infringement. In its blanket ban on filesharing, ICARUS also prohibits academic study of the way p2p networks work.

The article — written by a student himself, I might add, who told us he uses IRC to download movies — summarizes our case in contrast to those who run the network. It glosses over a few key points, though:

“We’ve been very tight-lipped about how it’s designed,” said ICARUS’ creator. But various reports state that ICARUS incorporates the code from open-source programs. If any of that code originates from software licensed under the GPL or another “share-alike” license, ICARUS’ programmers are required to allow access to that code if they modify and distribute it.

Further, the network services coordinator says that any student who needs access to p2p for a legitimate reason can obtain an exemption. However, these exemptions are, of course, not advertised. Unsurprisingly, no one has ever gotten one. But students shouldn’t need an exemption to get use legitimate software in the first place.

The article also oversimplifies this: “Because music is one of many files that can be shared using P2P software, Free Culture … is against online music subscriptions.” We’re not against music subscriptions: if a student chooses to spend their money that way, it’s no concern of us. But we don’t want all housing residents to be required to pay for such a service, particularly when it only allows access to music and no other type of file. The university would be taking away one tool and forcing us to pay for an inferior replacement.

The photo caption is not entirely right either: while Eldo lives in Weaver Hall, I don’t. (I live in East.) We also didn’t form FFC to fight ICARUS, although that is part of what we plan to do. If it was just ICARUS, there would be no FFC.

I also don’t remember being anywhere near as eloquent as my quotes. In particular, I very rarely use the phrase “in harmony.” That’s a blog post for another day.

You gotta admit the photo is pretty cool, though. But damn if it doesn’t make me look pasty.

P.S. As a bit of trivia, the reporter found out about us by posting on LiveJournal.

Addendum: The error in the caption was corrected the following day. (The caption was written by the photographer, not the reporter.) Apparently, the original draft of the article was longer, less dumbed-down, and focused more on FC.

Since its 1.0 version release on 9 Nov 2004 - 67 days ago - the Mozilla Foundation’s open source Web browser, Firefox, has been downloaded over 20 million times.

That is not a small number.

Almost weekly, a new report hits the presses: Firefox gaining market share. Firefox creeping up on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox earning wide acceptance. Firefox pulling ahead.

The momentum of an immaculately-designed open source program cannot be stopped. Speed, security, ease of use, interoperability, flexibility, standards compliance, internationalization: these are the hallmarks of the best free software. Unsurprisingly, users respond well to those features. Add the responsiveness of programmers, the warm feeling of not signing your life away in a EULA, a sense of community, and a price you can’t beat… Well, you can see why us kids at Free Culture like free software and think it’s the wave of the future.

It’s worth mentioning that Firefox is supported by a user community of more than 63,000 people worldwide . These folks are the backbone of Firefox’s marketing campaigns. These folks, and others, pitched in their pennies to buy a full-page ad in the 16 Dec 2004 New York Times, as well as in the Turkish magazine Focus, and are raising funds now to buy an ad in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf. No doubt, several FC members are counted among their ranks.

This is the sort of grassroots culture we see possible in the world. This is Free Culture.

A landmark agreement has been reached in Peru, between indigenous people who have traditionally cultivated new varieties of the potato and the International Potato Center, which is affiliated with an international research center responsible for the world’s largest agro-biodiversity gene bank.

Why is this important to Free Culture? Because it shows that the privatization of community knowledge can and should have limits. The tribes were concerned that intellectual-property doctrine could be used as a prybar to remove their capacity to grow and develop their own strains of potatoes. With the assistance of a civil-society organization (what we in the U.S. would call a nonprofit), they successfully negotiated this agreement, which is legally recognized in Peru and which is hoped to set a precedent for future such developments.

As reported by Globalinfo.org:

An agreement between six indigenous communities and the International Potato Center in Cuzco, Peru, heart of the old Inca civilization in the Andes mountains of Latin America, recognizes the right of these communities over the unique potato strains they have developed and grown.

“No, this does not mean that these communities will now procure patents over these varieties of potato,” Alejandro Argumedo, associate director of the Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES), a Cuzco-based civil society group led by indigenous peoples, told IPS.

“These indigenous people are against patents,” Argumedo explained. “They represent a model of property that does not fit into their worldview. Indigenous people are used to exchanging and sharing information in open ways. But this means a legal agreement that no one else can claim intellectual property rights over their knowledge.”

I have no special knowledge of these issues, and I’m sure that there are flaws in this agreement. But it is a great example of the kind of conversation and negotiation that should be occurring, before we blithely allow any person or corporation to assert intellectual property “rights” over the food and the culture that sustain us.

My sincere apologies to anyone who has been unable to comment in our blog recently: our spam-fighting Wordpress plugin got a little overzealous in deleting comments. You should be able to comment freely now, so long as you don’t use obvious spam keywords, etc. Thanks to Eric Bailey, our new webmaster (and our favorite high school student ever) for fixing things up!

We have now installed a new plugin, Spam Karma, to replace the old Blacklist plugin. Spam Karma, among other things, implements a Captcha test to separate humans from spambots whenever it’s uncertain about a comment. If you are a person with permissions to post on this blog, then you are automatically allowed to post comments if you are logged in, you never have to prove that you’re human. It’s smart! I wish I were as intelligent as this plugin is.

Incidentally, we are looking for some experienced web people for FreeCulture.org who can put time into fixing up our website and helping to maintain it. We need help with backend, web design, and graphic design. If you are interested in doing your part to help this movement succeed, please contact us at freedomNO.SP@AM.freeculture.org, or webmaster Eric at ericNO.S@PAM.freeculture.org. [Please remove the obvious anti-spam techniques if you're human.]

Here’s something Nelson and I were talking about before break: Why is it so hard, on a small campus like Swarthmore, to keep up-to-date with news, information and lore? There’s a lot to keep up with in terms of campus goings-on — not just the big things like who’s been arrested, who’s won a Fulbright scholarship and who’s suing a major voting-machine corporation for DMCA abuse, but also what new dorm traditions are springing up, what new campus-specific slang is popping up, and who’s starting a new band.

There’s a frivolous-seeming yet important cultural need for stuff like this: Frequently the things an alum wants to know about what’s going on at her old school or a prospective wants to know before applying have more to do with informal traditions and broad-ranged gossip than the official stats the campus admissions website wants you to know about. Think about what the Jargon File (nee New Hacker’s Dictionary) means to the hacker community. More than that, though, even for big news traditional media isn’t very adequate to giving nuance and depth on a small scale. Something that happens even in local government will get follow-ups and analysis from the mainstream media; stuff that happens on campus, even if it’s a very big deal on campus, often gets maybe a couple weeks of coverage in a campus newspaper and a speech made about it by a faculty member, while the ramifications that develop over the next few months and the intense dialogue that may form around it restrained to the ephemeral environment of dorm-lounge conversations.

This logic applies to all sorts of small communities, but the unique cultural space colleges and universities inhabit makes this particularly significant for them. A partial solution might be mailing lists or message boards (like the ones sponsored by the Daily Jolt company for us in the Northeast) but those are limited, since they have a lot of room for spam and crap and not much of a filtering mechanism. Better would be a wiki system like the Swarthmore College Computing Society is trying to start up here at Swarthmore, though a pure wiki system might not be ideal — moderation of some sort should be present to keep things under control, given that the smaller audience a wiki has the more opportunity one bad apple has to abuse it.

So here’s the summary of what we’re interested in: A campus space open, potentially, to all, which would record ongoing events and the reactions to them as well as storing random information that is or was culturally significant to the community at some point in time. Partly a Jargon File for campuses, partly an informal Wikipedia, partly a newsfeed. Campuses push toward this sort of thing all the time — this push is what makes campus newspapers substantially different in tone and focus from commercial newspapers, is what causes any square footage of blank wall space to turn into a bulletin board, and so on. But the infrastructure is rarely there to create something lasting and interesting that isn’t either watered down by the limitations of a traditional medium or drowned out by graffiti. Creating a lasting system that everyone in a community could feel committed to and served by would be an awesome demonstration of what the Free Culture spirit is about.

The TeleRead blog points out a flagrant error in the Washinton Post’s 15 Jan “Names and Faces” column:

Bob Dylan aficionados can all breathe a sigh of relief: Not only does the ever-desired “Minnesota Party Tape” exist, it also has finally become public domain. … It has been copied onto CDs and cassettes so Dylan lovers can listen free at the Minnesota Historical Center library in St. Paul. And that’ll be the only place you can hear the tracks — copies will not be allowed. Imagine all the Dylan’ers who’ll be trekking to St. Paul! (emphasis added)

The column presents an absolute mis-use of the term “public domain”. Wikipedia sums it up like this:

The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest, as typically represented by a copyright or patent. Such works and inventions are considered part of the public’s cultural heritage, and anyone can use and build upon them without restriction.

“Without restriction” — obviously not the case with some CDs and cassettes which physically exist only in one location, with copies not allowed. Whether or not the recording is actually in the public domain — that is, the copyright has expired, or the copyright holder has dedicated it to the public domain — is not even addressed in the article. For the Post, apparently, that access to something is free (provided you meet certain conditions — in this case, going to St. Paul) is enough. The right to copy it, take it home, sell it, modify it, or listen to it in another environment — who needs those? As David Rothman writes at TeleRead, “Next thing you know, Dan Glickman (president and CEO of the MPAA) will be saying $15-a-pop movies are in the public domain since anyone can buy a ticket.”

Rothman continues, pointing out that the column not only passed through a reporter’s hands, but a copy desk. “The staffers there didn’t understand ‘public domain,’ and that speaks volumes about the quality and quantity of media coverage of such issues as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extenson Act.”

I won’t pretend to know why such a failure occured at the Washington Post. It represents, however, a total misunderstanding of free culture issues in the media. (Keep in mind that the Post is a heavily-read newspaper among legislators, aides, etc. in D.C.) This is a Very Bad Thing.

However, Rothman’s blog represents something good. In the open source movement, the concept is referred to as “many eyes.” If anyone has access to the source code, you’ll certainly have more people reviewing contributed code than if only a few employees review the code. These extra eyes make it more likely that someone will spot weaknesses and holes — and, by extension, make others aware of the problem, and help fix it.

Though writing in a blog can’t directly fix a problem, it can raise awareness of the problem and help explain it. Trent Lott might still be majority leader of the Senate were it not for bloggers irked by his comments at the birthday party of former Senator Strom Thurmond. In 1948, Thurmond ran for president under the pro-segregation Dixiecrat party. Lott remarked of his state, Mississippi, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Broadcast and print journalists ran the story as a 100-year-old senator’s birthday; blogs kept buzzing over the meaning of Lott’s comment, until the story was picked up by the established press. Later that month, Lott resigned as Senate Majority Leader.

The examples grow daily of news that slips through the established media until it’s caught by bloggers. The Post column is along those lines. Many people have increasing doubt at the efficacy of coprorate journalism in the light of conflicts of interest, media consolidation, and accusations of bias or activism. Blogging represents a new “estate” in journalism in that it offers a simple, democratic way to criticize both the newsmakers of the world and those who write the news.

Free Culture, as an organization, aims to encourage individuals to critique and to contribute, not just to consume the media diet prepared for them by any given source. We can also help educate established journalists on free culture issues so they’re better able to report about important events that affect all of us.
For now, feel free to email the Post and tell them what they did wrong. You might also email the Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler.