Like all advocates, we in the free culture movement sometimes struggle with how to talk about our issue so that the broader public can understand it. We also want them to care.

We assume that most folks are busy and don’t know much about free culture, and sometimes we also carry the unspoken assumption that If Only They Knew the facts, they’d change. Change their beliefs, habits, purchases, political decisions, whatever.

That’s why I was intrigued by a recent post from Tim Burke, musing about ways that people try to drum up interest in a cause:

[This is] a generally typical rhetorical strategy for trying to appeal to people for political or social discussions and meetings on a college campus or elsewhere, across a broad political spectrum. “Think that there’s no genocide in the world? Come learn the truth!”, or “Want to know the truth about liberal propaganda? Come hear our speaker!”.

There’s a kind of perverse logic embedded within the appeal, though. The audience allegedly addressed by the poster or notice is never actually the audience who responds to the information, or rarely so.

In other words, the people who show up to hear “The truth about Free Culture and corporate abuse of copyright!” are likely to already be sympathetic to our perspective.

Does that matter? Yes and no. If we want to build a group of people who care passionately about this issue, to work to change laws and dream up messages that will alter public policy, then the strategy Burke mentions is not a bad way to catch their attention.

Every movement needs some gutsy, hardworking activists. But we also need softer support. When a reactionary idea goes mainstream, it’s because most people think: “Duh! That’s obvious.” These days, it’s obvious that women should have the right to vote. In 1910, it wasn’t.

Back to Burke:

There’s nothing wrong with…trying to get roughly like-minded people together for a common effort. I don’t like it when I see such efforts clouded by appeals for dialogue, conversation, exploration, however. …I think those appeals are meant with great, in fact painful sincerity, which is a saving grace. But even so, it’s a terrible habit to get into…because it represents everyone with whom one disagrees as unenlightened, uninformed, as heathens yet-to-be converted to the true faith, not as people with worked-out convictions or even just some kind of substantive habitus which happens to diverge significantly from the premises of the group that’s trying to get together.

If we want to get our whole society to the “Duh! That’s obvious” response to Free Culture, we have to acknowedge not only that it might not be obvious to many people, but that they may have legitimate reasons for disagreeing.

It’s easy to speak out against bad laws and bad policies, and we should keep doing that, and advocating for better ones. But we should also admit that Free Culture in its purest form may never be obvious to mainstream Americans. And in figuring what elements will translate to the mainstream, we should talk with (not to) people who thoughtfully question our philosophy.

(Where are those thoughtful questioners? Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell recently asked the same question.)

From Crooked Timber:

The journal First Monday started publishing IT-related articles on the Web in May, 1996. The entire archives of the journal have remained freely accessible to the public over the years. First Monday will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this coming May in Chicago with a conference appropriately focusing on issues concering open collaboration on the Internet. In line with the journal’s history and the meeting’s topic, the program and related materials will be available online for all to see. Submissions are due February 6, 2006.

We in the Free Culture movement talk a lot about freedom to tinker and freedom of use. Freedom to collaborate is important too, and institutions like First Monday are valuable for their dedication to making ideas and conversations publicly available. After all, it’s tough to collaborate when content is locked down.

How do you get more than 1,000 students, faculty, and university visitors to become Free Culture advocates? Easy! Organize a mass serenade.

Free Culture’s Franklin & Marshall College chapter did just that, coordinating a massive (and officially sanctioned) sing-along rendition of “Happy Birthday” as part of the college’s recent 300th birthday celebration of founder Benjamin Franklin. This public performance actually broke the law — a perfect example of why we need copyright reform.

Read all about it on the F&M chapter blog. And then, for more exciting examples of Free Culture activism, check out what all our chapters are up to through the aggregated Chapter Blog on our website. Enjoy!

The New York Times reports (registration required) that a Canadian news-parody show akin to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show has been forbidden to use video clips of political debates.

[D]uring the current Canadian federal election campaign, Canada’s television satirists have faced an issue that has never troubled “The Daily Show.” An agreement between Canada’s main television networks and its largest political parties blocks the shows from using film clips from the televised leaders’ debates (although the film is still available to conventional news and current affairs shows).

“It speaks for the parties’ great respect for the power of satirical shows that they would demand this,” said Roger Abbott, an Air Farce performer and writer.

Let’s get this straight. It’s OK for Canadian citizens to see a clip of the prime minister debating — if the person commenting on the clip is serious. But it’s not OK if the person commenting on it is making a joke?

This is a terrible precedent. (And yes, I think it’s a precedent even though I live in the United States.) It’s terrible because it chops off yet another piece of our historic right to fair use. Let’s review: Fair use means taking a small snippet of something (like 15 seconds of an hour-long debate) and using it in another context. A TV show doing something like that is obviously not trying to recreate the whole debate. They’re not competing with the producers of the debate, and they’re not making money by copying somebody else’s product. They’re making their own original work. That’s been legal for a long time, and it should stay legal.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the consortium of TV broadcasters that produce the Canadian debates made a Faustian bargain and gave up a big chunk of that long-established right to fair use.

[...]CBC spokesman, Jason MacDonald, who also speaks for the consortium, said that the rule dates back several years; the networks, he explained, agreed to the politicians’ demand in exchange for a promise that campaigns would not use debate clips in their ads.

Translation: TV stations agreed not to let comedians make fun of politicians, and in return the politicians promised not to…um…hold each other accountable for what they said in a public debate. Wait — how is that a fair trade? (Yes, I understand that politicians often use misleading clips in their ads. Even so, is that a reason to forbid their use?)

What’s most disappointing in this news story is the TV stations’ lack of backbone. Politicians running for office need TV a lot more than TV needs them. Instead of acting like professionals, the Canadian consortium seems to have rolled over and given up fair-use rights that have been established (at least in the U.S.) for a very long time.

Apparently the comedians came up with a makeshift solution:

Mr. Abbott said that Air Farce considered declaring itself a news program, but in the end its cast used one of its specialties - impersonation - to create mock versions of the debates.

Clever, but I wish they’d fought harder to use the clips. Every piece of ground we give up in the fight for fair and reasonable copyright policy is a piece we’ll have to re-take someday in the future.

Nelson and I first met Kai at the “Free Culture Phase 2″ event organized at American University in May 2005, where he was one of the organizers working with AU’s Prof. Kathryn Montgomery in the School of Communications. Kai has also been a writer for Die Gegenwart, a German online magazine; more recently he’s started his own blog, Freihoch3. On Friday he published “The EFF is our mother”, an interview with me on free culture and the free culture movement, as well as FC.o and the international dimensions of free culture activism. Check it out—interview is in English, introduction in German.

Hello everyone. We are ‘live-blogging’ (nelson’s term) form the Northeast Regional Summit at Columbia University. This is a community effort. Evan says “Pizza was fantastic!” Seth Johnson is here and says “DRM is theft.” We all agree!

Join us in our new Pledgebank pledge to boycott DRM:

DRM severely restricts our rights as users, creators, and members of the global community. We will not stand by and let fair use grow extinct as a consequence of poorly thought out technology and the laws that support it.

It’s really absurd that the content industry wants to penalize people who are buying legitimate CDs by restricting what they can do with the products they can buy, and we should not support this behavior.

Cereal Solidarity is still making headlines, and perhaps deservedly so. The patent office itself has taken notice of our efforts. In the patent examiner’s summary of a telephone interview with Cereality and their lawyers, the patent examiner mentioned the Cereal Solidarity website and asked Cereality to respond to our criticisms!

The Applicants’ claims of novelty and/or unobviousness were discussed related to the above-mentioned prior art and commonly known practices previously in the public domain. PTO personnel presented the Applicants with internet commentaries regarding the subject application (Attachments 1- Cereal Solidarity and 2 - Patent News: Bad Cereal…) and invited commentary. No agreement regarding novelty or unobviousness was reached.

To read this document and maybe some other boring documents (annoyingly the “Non-patent literature” is not posted online), just search for patent # 11/078,686… this quote is on the 6th page of the first document listed. Linking to the document itself is difficult, my apologies.

So as I was saying, our Cereal Solidarity efforts have been mentioned in some mainstream news sources recently, including the Salt Lake Tribune (Cereal Daze: Not Just For Kids) and In These Times (Snap, Crackle… Patents). Bizarrely, In These Times neglected to mention Cereal Solidarity itself, and they unfortunately called us FreeCulture instead of FreeCulture.org, but that’s OK because they interviewed many of our friends such as Jason Schultz from EFF, Kembrew McLeod, and Nicholas Reveille from Downhill Battle.

Also strangely, Gavin started the campaign and has been the driving force behind it, but I (Nelson) ended up being the only person interviewed about it, for the Salt Lake Tribune. Poor Gavin only got a misquote in the UK’s Daily Telegraph ( Bran hits the fan in US ‘cereal café’ wars), where a chunk of the website that Karen actually wrote was placed in his mouth. We were somewhat annoyed at this lack of journalistic integrity, but Karen thought it was funny.

We plan to deliver the petitions soon. Stay tuned!

We have a new board. We are Nelson Pavlosky, Gavin Baker, Elizabeth Stark, Fred Benenson, and Karen Rustad. Check out our bios on the about page!

We are currently meeting in Cambridge at Elizabeth’s lovely abode until Saturday working on writing foundational documents, getting non-profit status, and other important things. Tonight we watched a pre-released copy of Alternative Freedom, a new documentary by the Free Zarathustra Project. Tomorrow we begin work on finalizing a policy paper and mission statement. Nelson will also speak at Elizabeth’s Harvard cyberlaw course.

We’re off to a rocking start! See you tomorrow!