While Sid, Gavin, Elizabeth, Andy, and Nelson have taken over Lessig’s blog for the next week, I’ll be here working on a list of books that every college student interested in the free culture movement should read.

Consider it Free Culture: 101 (or in binary… Free Culture 1100101)

If you’re coming to this site via Lessig’s blog, your homework for tonight is to find one good book for our Free Culture syllabus and post your suggestion in the comments.

Class dismissed!

As part of the EFF’s 15 year anniversary Blog-a-thon, Freeculture.org invites all students, young people, and free culture advocates to blog about what matters to them and what first inspired them to fight for digital freedom. We’d love for fc.o members to write about why they decided to get involved in the organization and how they became so passionate about the issues.

Representing a new generation of digital freedom fighters, we’d love to hear the method behind your madness. (Of course we’re talking madness in the most positive of ways…)

And if you haven’t already started blogging, we can’t think of a better reason to get started.

MONTRÉAL – A few more words on my travels.

Two weeks ago, while I was in Ottawa, I had the fortunate chance to have lunch with three well-known names in the Canadian copyfight:

• Michael Geist, columnist and professor
• Marcus Bornfreund, project lead for Creative Commons Canada
• Russel McOrmond, self-made activist and sponsor of Digital Copyright Canada

I got to learn a bit about the state of free culture in Canada and hear their thoughts on Bill C-60, the proposal currently on the table to revise Canadaian copyright law. Michael was written fairly extensively about it – I won`t go overboard with links – but here`s a place to start: killbillc60.ca.

Needless to say, it was interesting to hear their opinions on the bill, and get a little insight into the “scene” here. I think it`s fair to say that it`s not exactly the best bill that Canada could hope for; on the other hand, if it were to pass in it`s current form, it`d be a far cry from the horror it could have been.

Later that week, I met Andy Kaplan-Myrth, a recent graduate of the University of Ottawa `s law school. I got to hear more about the differences between the situation in Canada and in the U.S., which issues are interesting and relevant to Canadians, and how to find interested students.

When I return to the States, I`ll spend a bit of time recruiting in Canada. Due to the geographical proximity and commonalities in language and legal system, those of us in the U.S. can do more to work with interested students in Canada than just about anywhere else. If you`re a Canadian who would be interested in working with a Canadian wing of FreeCulture.org, or have ideas about how to connect with folks in Canada, feel free to comment on this post.

I thought it was probably about time I said hello and introduced myself to the readers of the blog. Hey there - I’m Matt Lee, newly appointed web monkey for freeculture.org - you might be wondering whatever happened to Abhay. Unfortunately he was in a car accident, but the good news is that he’s okay. Our thoughts are with him. Therefore, I have taken over the role of all things web.

So, here we are. I’m Matt Lee and I live in the UK. I am the founder of the CNUK Media Foundation - we’re doing some cool free culture stuff in the UK. Freeculture.org is an interesting project for me, not least because of the time difference and working with a group of highly energetic students on the other side of the globe always promises a few surprises in my inbox in the mornings. What I had inherited was a website with a lot of promise, and a lot of content, but no clear direction of where to take the site, and nobody seemed to be able to give it the love and attention it deserved - a pretty good start nevertheless.

What I’m planning, over the coming days, weeks and months is a migration period, which is where we’re at right now - the site and blog should be much quicker to respond, and the wiki is now in its rightful place. The next stage, is to refine the look and feel of all our web projects, so everything looks like it’s the same site, and none of it looks like an out of the box Mediawiki or Wordpress (they’re both fine looks, but they’re everywhere!)

The next phase, will bring content management and a new, more accessible design to freeculture.org - we’ll be using the Plone content management system. I’ve got a lot of experience with it, and it really is the best free software content management out there. In fact, Public Knowledge and the FSF are using it - we’re also using it for most of our projects at CNUK. With content management will come the ability for anyone authorised to update the website, without needing to know any HTML - a huge barrier to getting non-geeks involved - giving the web team more time to focus its efforts on all sorts of cool stuff.

Speaking of web teams, we could really use more volunteers - if you’re interested drop me an email - web@freeculture.org - and tell me what your experience with GNU/Linux, PHP, MySQL, Plone/Zope, Wordpress, Planet and Mediawiki is. Don’t worry if you’ve not heard of some of them - any serious offers gratefully received.

Oh, and we want your blogs. Send us your RSS feed URLs. We’ll love you.

As per the US Patent and Trademark office homepage, a Bush administration official educated children attending “Camp Innovation” on the horrible consequences of intellectual property “theft:”

Dudas reminded the children that copying or downloading others’ property without their permission is a crime, and that this crime has real economic consequences for our economy.

Apparently while teaching children the perils of copyright violation may not be above their level, discussing the virtues of fair use were conveniently left out. Perhaps someone needs to remind Dudas that there is a very legal way to copy portions of someone’s property without their permission.

Illegally copying computer games, DVDs and other products is just as wrong as stealing these items from the store.

Perhaps we might also want to remind Dudas about the difference between physical property and digital property. To put it plainly, when I take a DVD from the store, it is no longer there, but when I make a digital copy, it is not detracting from your ability to view the file. I think the children at Camp Innovation can grasp that.

Dudas also used his remarks to educate the students about what constitutes intellectual property, explaining that the term ‘intellectual property’ can be used to describe many products—a car, a medicine, a toy, a video game or a CD—as long as the product began as an idea.

So as long as children “realize” at a young age that there should be absolute ownership of ideas, the agenda will be perpetuated. This seems analogous to British officials encouraging elementary school children to place copyright symbols on their homework.

While the PTO has set out to reach the nation’s youngest, it may in fact be too late to get the Napster generation on board. When Attorney General Gonzales spoke to high school students about “online piracy” in April, many were unsympathetic.

Is this really the message we want to be sending to our nation’s children? Accept restrictive IP policies at a young age and you’ll never even question it otherwise!

Press release on the visit

In the introduction to Building Public Value, a document outlining the British Broadcasting Corporation’s long-term goals, BBC Chairman Michael Grade describes a vision for the publicly-funded broadcaster that supports innovation, equity, and most importantly, universality:

…Some key principles cannot be up for negotiation if the BBC is to remain recognisably the BBC. These are that the BBC must be available to everyone, deliver value to everyone and be open to everyone. The public interest must remain at the heart of all the BBC does. It must remain absolutely independent from political and commercial influence. And it must have the ability to invest for the long term, to incubate talent, to innovate and bear the risks that innovation brings.

As the document describes in great detail, the BBC plans to create public value in the future by transforming Britain a fully digital nation, rooting all of its programming in quality and creativity, and embracing new uses of digital technology to make “BBC into an open cultural and creative resource for the nation.” The last goal seems especially relevant to us, and already several efforts are underway that signal the BBC’s commitment to free culture ideals.

Most recently, the BBC has listed several of its open source projects at bbc.co.uk/opensource. Among the software is a cross-platform video codec (Dirac), a Java API for working with TV programming metadata (TV-Anytime Java API), and a testbed architecture for media delivery systems (Kamaelia). The site also explains why open source is important to the BBC:

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they’ve funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn’t get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

In fall 2004, the BBC launched the Creative Archive, a service allowing people to download clips BBC factual programms for non-commercial use. The license for such content is based on the Creative Commons model, allowing (as the banner touts) to rip, mix, and share.

Efforts like these make it clear that the BBC understands the potential of digital creativity and public value. Hopefully, the BBC will not loose sight of its goals and will continue to push for projects that benefit all who participate in them (and even those who don’t).

Addendum:
In a slightly related (and unfortunate) note, classical music labels are attacking the BBC for providing free downloads to all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies during a month-long period, which is now over. Anthony Anderson, managing director of the Naxos label, voices his complaint: “I think there is a question of whether a publicly funded broadcaster should be doing this and there is the obvious issue that it is devaluing the perceived value of music. You are also leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.”

When music executives equate downloading free files to futile consumption, they fail to take into account all the non-material benefits of opening up a musical collection, even temporarily. Of the million-plus downloads of the symphonies, a good percentage were probably from people who may never have listened to any of Beethoven’s symphonies besides the Fifth, or who curiously stumbled onto the page and wanted to broaden their cultural horizons. Even if this were not the case, and all the downloads came from Beethoven aficionados, then at least those people gained the privilege — and pleasure — of listening to more recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The end result is certainly not “owning these files for nothing.”

OTTAWA – A few words on my travels so far in Canada.

Last week I met some of the agents in Montréal’s thriving libre scene: LUGs, commercial free software developers and consultants, non-profits (they call them NGOs) and ad hoc collectives. For example, the city owes much of its wireless Internet to ÃŽle Sans Fil (literally, “Island Without Wiresâ€?) which work s with small businesses, etc. to dispatch Linux-equipped Linksys routers.

A few people mentioned to me that in the past few years, these various groups have come together in a higher cohesion, working more closely together on their common interests. That makes me happy – and it’s needed, if we’re to withstand external threats and advance our common cause. (Of course, that’s part of what Free Culture groups aim to do, on a campus level.)

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