This handbook is not, of course, a substitute for the study of Marxist political economy, but an aid to that study. It will perhaps prove most useful as an aid to review. It was first developed for the Fourth International’s cadre school in Europe. It was subsequently also used by the Democratic Socialist Party in its cadre school. Along the way, many of the definitions and explanations were modified to take account of students’ difficulties or further questions.

I am not sure what the state of Marxist education is in other countries, but it seems to me that we could all do with a higher level of theory, and I do not believe that it would necessarily lead to sectarian distinctions. In my view that is an artifact of forms of organization, and not theoretical focus as such (if anything, the latter might be caused by the former as well). I believe subjective conditions are looking up for us, so I hope we're ready if and when we get any openings. Under current conditions, I think our best course of action (certainly mine!) is study and agitprop.

• Dia do Acesso Livre!

É importante que, hoje em dia, em meio a toda essa revolução digital que estamos passando, nós tenhamos noção da dimensão do que conceitos como "Acesso Livre" significam.

Para maiores informações,

• Spread the word — downloadables, creatables, educational resources;
• SPARC;
• Students for a Free Culture.

Feliz Dia do Acesso Livre! :twisted:

Here's a look at what's happening this week at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, courtesy of Logan Circle News on Yahoo! Groups. You can sign up to be part of the group and to receive regular e-mail updates.

This Week at the Historical Society of Washington, DC

• Through Dec. 15: Frank Smith: "40 Years Since the Riots," collection of Smith's art.
• Through Oct. 15: Latino Art Beat – works by aspiring high school students.
• PRESENTE: photographs and memorabilia from D.C.'s Latino lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
• Tuesday, Oct 14, noon: film, "The Night James Brown Saved Boston."
• Tuesday, Oct. 14, 6:30 p.m,: lecture, "1968 Then and Now."
• Wednesday, Oct. 15, noon: film, "Through Our Eyes," 30 Years of the D.C. Latino Story.
• Wendesday, Oct 15, 12:45 p.m.: film, "Frida."
• Saturday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m.: lecture, "Not Your Grandmother's Canning," pickling for dinner.
• Saturday, Oct. 18, 1:30 p.m.: film, Muxe's: "Authentic, Intrepid Seekers of Danger."

The Historical Society of Washington, DC, is located at 801 K St. NW at Mt. Vernon Square. All events are free unless otherwise indicated. For more detailed information, visit the website or call 202 383-1850.

Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond

Where it began
I can't begin to knowin'
But then I know it's growin' strong

Was in the spring
And spring became a summer
Who'd have believed you'd come along

Hands, touchin' hands
Reachin' out
Touchin' me
Touchin' you

Sweet Caroline (ba, ba, ba or pam, pam, pam)
Good times never seemed so good (So good, so good, so good)
I've been inclined
To believe they never would
But now I

Look at the night
And it don't seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two
And when I hurt
Hurtin' runs off my shoulders
How can I hurt when holdin' you

Warm, touchin' warm
Reachin' out
Touchin' me
Touchin' you

Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I've been inclined
To believe they never would
Oh,Lord, no

Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
Sweet Caroline
I believed they never could
Sweet Caroline

More info: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4930465

Go RedSox.

From the beginning, the internet has been struggling to find its economic raison d'être. By allowing digital goods to be copied freely and at merely zero cost, it gave a blow to traditional business models, mostly based on selling copies. Since then, no alternate economic model seems to be able to fill the gap.

Advertising has long been thought to be the solution. It was the first model to emerge and to achieve a significant success. And it has been since then the main economic propeller of the web.  But as impressive advertising revenues growth are, this model alone is in no way able to fulfill the economic needs of the current internet planet, much less to be a guarantor of its future. The quantity of contents produced by "amateurs" who cannot or do not seek monetary gratification is already huge and it’s growing extraordinarily. It is impossible for the advertising model to sustain such growth and diversification.

Other business models have been used with some success. Like the Freenium model (a few people pay for the enhanced product, subsidizing the many others who get the basic product for free).  But again, like other models based on selling some sort of copies, it is inefficient, unless you restrict the ability of your product to be copied.

The internet is a complex animal whose metabolism is based on Free. Any attempt to restrict freeness is condemned, if not to failure, to hopelessly squander resources to fight the natural tendency of the Internet of Things to revendicate this freedom. This is why all efforts to enforce copy protection have proven difficult, when not impossible. DRM and other copy protection mechanisms are dead ends in the digital world because they go against the fundamental nature of the internet, the free circulation of data.

The internet is the realm of the Free.

But, as economists like to say, there is no free lunch, not even in Cyberspace. So, how can you make money with Free stuff?

There are many promising solutions currently being explored. Kevin Kelly' texts Better Than Free and 1,000 True Fans are the best reflections on the subject I know of. He defines 8 "generative" values that can be exploited in a world of Free. Most of them are already being used to some extent, like "findability" (iTunes, Netflix), others are barely exploited.

But so far, none of these models seems to possess the potential to successfully propel the internet into the much announced new digital economy era.

Wait, maybe there is one.

In another life of mine, I used to do consulting work in business process reengineering. The first step when one wants to examine a process is to chart it. So let's chart the economic process of Free.

If you look at this diagram, there is one clear conclusion. In order for this process to be economically viable, you need to close the loop and provide some kind of value exchange from the Consumer of Free to the Producer of Free. This is obvious and only restates our original problem: how can we close the loop and give a smile back to the producer?

Some might argue that since a Producer of Free is almost certainly also a Consumer of Free, he gets some payback by taking advantage of other's Free contents and services.  Like in a Gift Economy. It is all true and good, except that this doesn't put more money into his pockets (although it does help).

If you look again at the diagram from a very high perspective, there is one obvious label for the missing link that readily comes into mind.

Free Payment or payment libre. A payment that the consumer is free to make, or not to make. A payment free of any mandatory value. A payment libre of any constraints.

The Free Payment model is an intuitive, natural, elegant and simple solution to the Free Culture economic dilemma. So much that it's already all over the place and used since the origin of the internet. It is called patronage, donation, sponsoring or micro-payment, but it's exactly the same idea. And it's growing steadily, almost unnoticed.

Because people want to pay.

Those arguing that people will never pay for something they can have for free, grossly underestimate humankind intelligence and common sense. Because it is only common sense to pay for something you use and enjoy. This way, you make sure there will be more in the future. You secure your future happiness. It is the clever thing to do, in a selfish way. Doing otherwise will end up inevitably killing the creation of Free, and people are wise enough to understand it.

But Free payment is above all a question of passion and love. Love for an artist, for a writer, passion for a community. It is "a way of connecting, a sign of approval, a vote, it indicates an allegiance with the maker, and it feels good to the payer".

I strongly believe that Free Payment, together with "Better Than Free" generatives, represents a solution, if not the only solution to the economy of Free. Because it respects and reinforces the ethos of the Free Culture and of the internet. It is a way to concretize the promises of the Long Tail. A way to give hope and relief to the countless creators of the web. A way to sustain and defend the unprecedented explosion of creativity and inventiveness triggered by the internet. It is at everyone's interest, producers of Free and consumers of Free, all Nitizens.

And it just needs to reach a critical mass of participants to become a real economic revolution.

For this to happen, the culture of Free Payment only needs to be marketed and fostered, because the seeds are already there. Many people give their time, talent, creativity and money into the economy of Free. It is called Open Source, Web2.0, Online Communities, Blogs, Wikipedia... and Free Payments, all part of the Free Culture revolution.

Free Payment might be the missing link toward the realization of a thriving and sustainable Gift Economy of Free. Because Free Payments are truly gifts.

Some might say that gift economies are pure utopias.

I know of a bunch of utopian people who, once a year, create an amazing gift economy society, out in a remote desert of Nevada. And they build pretty incredible things. It is called Burning Man.

They know and I know that utopias are quite often very possible futures. It only depends on us.

Pierre M

To have [the song] appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyric just tarnishes the song.

Only property can be "appropriated", not copyrighted work. Unfortunately, the Foo Fighters mistakenly refer to copyright as "Intellectual Property" which just confuses the issue. However, if we insist on playing the "property" analogy game, the closest action to "appropriation" would be to claim authorship. The McCain camp did not do this.

The only way to "tarnish" a copyrighted work is to change it and distribute or perform the derivative work without notice of the adjustments. Even then, "tarnish" is really in the eye of the beholder. There is no "tarnishing" when using a context (e.g. a rally) in trying to persuade an audience toward an interpretation of an original work left intact.  And while an exception to persuasion would surely be a rally promoting hatred, the McCain campaign is at worst promoting stupidity, not hate. So long as the song's attribution stays intact, it's used non-commercially, and is non-derivative in nature, I lean heavily toward laws allowing such uses of published art, regardless of how much I sympathize with the Foo Fighters in this case.

Putting the law aside however, I see it in the best interest of the McCain camp to cease using the song and honor the request of the artist. Politically, they've nothing to gain by fighting the Foos on this one.

My Brother's Wedding

This was a really fantastic day! Matt and Sarah both looked awesome, lots of family and friends made the trip down to sunny (for a change) Cornwall, and my best man's speech went perfectly. We certainly couldn't have asked for anything more, and it's the perfect start to their new life together :)

Think Mum and Dad are finding it a little strange with Matt married and me at uni, but they're getting used to it and already reaping the benefits with a holiday to the Lake District in half term!

Moving House

Last year I lived in catered halls, so didn't have to pay bills or cook; this year, I'm living in a private house with 4 friends, having to arrange and pay for utillities, cook for ourselves, and do all the general things you do to keep a house in order. So far, I love cooking :) Had a crack at a roast dinner on Sunday, hardly a typical student meal, but it was Fay's birthday and she loves roast potatoes!

General living is the same as last year, but a little busier during the first week, heading out to see lots of different friends again etc.

Bills are rubbish though, and I think I'm going to need to earn a little bit of cash to help me through the year - any body got any suggestions!?

Started Lectures

Have less lectures time tabled this semester, but I think that's due to Hebrew being 30 credits but only 3 hours. Means I have a fair amount of work to do outside of class this time, but I'm confident I have plenty of room to step up my efforts compared to last year. Besides Hebrew, I'm doing modern theology and the divine world in the Hebrew Bible this semester - both look like they're going to be really interesting. Hebrew is definitely going to be even better than last year, as we're doing actual translations and criticism of translations - will help a lot with my understanding of how theologies develop etc.

Trying out the Cornell note taking method this term, as referenced by Life Hacker. Seems cool so far,  but I'd like to look into reading methods to help me approach that better too.

Built A Server

Partly for fun, partly because I'm paranoid, I've built my own server for hosting all my web related activites. Still working on and learning to deploy the software properly, but it's been cool so far with lots of learning happening!

Mum's School's Website

My Mum's school were in desperate need of a new website, and while I'm no web designer, anything I did would be better than what was already in place! Finally got that online this week, and all seem pleased with the result.

ume-launcher Package

After switching to the Mini Inspiron 9, I decided to try out my packaging skills from FUDCon and package a few of the Ubuntu netbook packages. I think there's 5 in total, and I just got one of the major components through review and into updates-testing for F9. Found a bug with it not building for rawhide and F8 which I'm working on now, and I've also got to deal with the other reviews and fix the problems with those packages. Hopefully we'll have a full set of netbook packages in Fedora within the next month or so.

All In All

Things are going well for me... Feel tired tonight, but I'm taking the time to recouperate a little bit. My best wishes to everyone who reads this far, you certainly deserve them (even if you didn't read this far, you probably deserve them anyway!) . For now, I'm off to read a little non-theology, non-geek related stuff: Pilgrim On Tinker Creek - my Dad recommended it and I'm really enjoying it, although taking it slowly.

Eine großartige Chance für die beiden Künstler, auf einen Schlag Millionen von Nutzern zu erreichen. Eine klassische Win-Win-Situation: Ubuntu bekommt gute neue Beispieldateien, die Künstler können Ruhm und Ehre für sich beanspruchen und auch die Freie-Kultur-Szene an sich profitiert: von neuen Werken, die neu vermischt werden können.

Across the globe, from Peru to Croatia to Korea to South Africa, a new cultural space is emerging - the digital commons. In it, users are creating culture and knowledge, be it by blogging, making videos, remixing songs, or writing software. While it may manifest itself in different ways in different places, this movement, much like the nature of the internet itself, has become a truly global one, and has served to transcend barriers across cultures.

Many of these barriers are already breaking down - the lines between "amateur" and "professional," and "user" and "creator" are becoming increasingly blurred. A little less than a year ago, I posted a mix of Brazilian Baile funk music on my blog. This style of music, while quite well known in Brazil, had just recently been getting a lot of attention in the US and Europe. As a result, it was picked up by various other blogs, and tens of thousands of downloads later, it had made its way into the best mixes of 2005 in one of the premiere electronic music magazines, The Wire. In many ways for me, it was a lesson in semiotic democracy and the grassroots, viral nature of the internet. I had merely published something to my blog, and without any further effort on my part, people around the world started listening to my mix. I had become a part of the digital cultural revolution without even realising it.

By posting my mix online and allowing others free access to it, I had entered the "cultural commons", or a common space of cultural information that is available for the public at large to share, rework, and remix. For example, old books or films (before 1923 in the US) where the copyright has expired and is now in the public domain as well as the massive amount of knowledge contained in Wikipedia, the world's largest user-created encyclopedia, would be a part of this growing pool of global information. As opposed to opting for traditional copyright, which would lock down a work and prevent such access or reworking, creators may opt for various licenses, including those of Creative Commons, to add to this knowledge space.

Brazil, despite its relatively strong copyright law on the books, has been a hotbed of commons-based activity in practice. The entire genre of Baile funk, which has emerged from Brazil's ghetto-like favelas and has begun to pervade mainstream culture there, relies almost exclusively on remixing. Go to a Funk Ball, or Baile, in the favela of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, and you will likely recognize samples and snippets of a good amount of the music you hear - from Prince to New Order to 50 Cent.

What's more, the music is created without any regard to copyright, and this is what allows it to flourish. Artists freely borrow and remix from others, and CDs are sold on the streets for little more than the cost of the production of the physical CD. Artists don't receive royalties from the CDs, but instead view them as promotion of their work and their performances, and some of the parties that are organised attract tens of thousands of fans. Needless to say, these Bailes can be extremely lucrative for the funk artists. Brazil has also been extremely progressive in supporting open business models (or those that do not rely on restricting access to content or culture), has been active in patent-busting, and has generally viewed culture as a space to which citizens have a right to access, as opposed to a commodity to which consumers have a right to purchase.

A creative revolution

What the digital commons recognises is that creation is not produced out of a vacuum; we inevitably build upon the works of others, be it consciously or subconsciously. Thanks to advances in digital technology and communications networks, we are entering a new era of creative production. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the internet was viewed as having unlimited, even unrealistic potential as a medium for commerce.

Now, it has increasingly become a platform for cultural communication, with everything from citizen journalism via blogging to tagged photo albums via Flickr to melding together songs or movies via mashups. Yet much like the great failed hopes for e-commerce, some question whether this new digital cultural revolution will actually affect our culture in fundamental ways. While it will clearly morph and evolve in various and perhaps unexpected ways, this cultural revolution is here to stay.

The very heart of this revolution rests on a simple concept: semiotic democracy, or the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in public cultural discourse. You've all probably seen a YouTube video where someone is lip synching to a song or heard a mashup of two popular tracks, yet this new form of cultural creation goes far beyond faddish remixes or home videos. Users are by and large developing and posting their own "original" creations as well. (Original may be a misnomer, but let's suffice it to say that examples such as blog posts, photographs, and songs written by a band are not blatant remixes.)

Anyone can now become a creator, a publisher, an author via this new form of cultural discourse, a platform to publish to the world at large that grants near instant publication and access. While the concept of, say, being able to post or comment on one's blog may seem mundane at this point, if I had told you fifty years ago that you'd be able to publish something so that almost anyone, anywhere could read it instantly, it would have sounded like something out of a science fiction model.

Individual artists, producers, and musicians need no longer depend on the power of major corporations as producers or distributors. Take MySpace, where many new and up and coming bands have posted their music. Instead of relying on a record label, they can now gain exposure and disseminate their music via the site, where some bands have had sold-out tours or sold countless CDs thanks to their MySpace page.

Despite the increasing ease of doing so, though, we see that many professional creators are still relying on the publisher-centric business models of the 20th century. This will not last. We will see massive disintermediation in the next decade or so. More artists and creators will self-publish, and they will find ways to do so in a sustainable way, perhaps by selling mp3s on their website, opportunities for production work, or touring to a greater number of fans.

That's not to say that everyone will become a professional, or that there won't be a space for those who merely wish to create as a hobby. Yet the age of the superstar is set to decline. As more people have more access to culture that interests them, coupled with the proper tools to get them there, it is highly likely that they will not all gravitate toward the same megastars. Throughout the last fifty years, culture in the western world has primarily been filtered by a few major corporate entities, sometimes looking for the next best thing, and increasingly trying just to recreate it. The digital cultural revolution, if it materialises, will enable us to forgo those filters and seek out more of what we like, or perhaps enable us to discover something we love, but would have never known it otherwise.

Threats to progress

Yet as we enter this era of democratic cultural production, the law is increasingly out of touch with reality. There's a complete lack of congruence between what is on the books and what is actually happening in the real (or digital) world. The vast majority of the remixes out there, believe it or not, are illegal. Ranging from video lip synching to recreating film trailers, they infringe the copyright law that has been harmonized throughout most of the modern world.

In fact, just last week the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it would start tackling the "problem" of users creating videos that infringed on their copyrighted works. (Bands sign away the copyright to their recorded works in virtually all major label contracts, leaving it in control of the labels.) As a result, they have sent "cease and desist" letters to those who have made the videos, and they are working with YouTube to develop technologies to identify their music in such videos so that it can be taken down.

It's quite interesting, then, that these are the same record companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and marketing, and yet when such users are arguably doing so for free, they immediately seek to put a stop to it under the guise of "intellectual property" violations. Music videos are primarily utilized for the promotion of CD sales to begin with, and it is completely conceivable that such videos would serve as a benefit to the owners of the music as an albeit unintentional yet effective tool of marketing and advertising.

Further, digital rights management (DRM), or technologies that restrict access to a particular digital work, such as not allowing users to print pages of eBooks or make a copy of a digital music file, poses a serious threat to the development of the digital commons.

Laws have traditionally allowed for fair uses of copyrighted works, whereby an author can, for example, take a clip or excerpt of a work for artistic, critical, or educational use, or record a copy of a TV programme for later viewing. Technologies such as DRM stand to prohibit such legally granted rights, and laws that prohibit the circumvention of these access control measures can even stand to criminalise what would otherwise be a completely legal use (for example, getting around the technological access controls in an eBook of a public domain work would be a violation of such laws).

The increasingly burdensome application of copyright law to uses that were previously given a blind eye, such as quick clips of other videos in documentaries or songs with 3-second samples from others, stands to pose serious burdens to creators, while the fear of potentially getting sued has resulted in the stifling of creative work that makes even legal uses of others' works. So as we have an increasing amount of culture produced that completely disregards copyright, it has been coupled with a backlash from those that view such creation as a threat to their current business models.

The implications of the backlash can be seen in the example of a song called Amen Brother released by a soul band called The Winstons. It contained an irresistible drum riff, one that would later capture the minds and ears of producers and the listening public at large. A multi-second portion of the song, what has become to be known as the Amen Break, was discovered by hip-hop artists in the 1980s and utilised to produce the underlying beat that has been in countless songs since.

In fact, an entire genre of music, known primarily as drum'n'bass, is almost completely reliant on this portion of the song that lasts less than 20 seconds. Luckily for us, this music developed in a culture where sampling was a new art aided by the development of samplers, or machines that allowed the replaying and modifications of portions of audio tracks, and where artists were able to essentially freely sample and borrow from others.

A remixed future?

In the last several years, this golden era of sampling has come to a close, with courts in the US declaring that a mere three-second sample is sufficient to constitute a copyright violation, and that any sample of a digital recording whatsoever, even lasting a millisecond, would be an infringement of copyright. If the laws of today had been exercised twenty-five years ago, hip-hop, among other genres, may very well not exist today as we know it.

While the legal threats to the digital commons are often the expression of business or corporate interest, different concerns arise. Some worry about the dangers of having such an explosion of available culture and knowledge, and these concerns are not without merit. We are increasingly entering an age where we have too much information and too little time, perpetual multitasking with shortened attention spans.

Sifting through the information and the culture, especially when there may be a lot of stuff out there that is just plain bad, is not an easy task. There is thus an ever-increasing role for aggregators, or ways of sifting through and recommending various forms of culture, be it a cool, new band, or an interesting article. Such filtering mechanisms, which could range from a blog that readers trust to provide quality links to articles (i.e. BoingBoing) to a website that users rely on to provide reliable critical music reviews (a la Pitchfork) may serve a critical role as the amount of available content out there increases.

Others stay awake at night fretting about the decline of a "common culture", a common space, be it one of political events or popular TV shows, that can bind a society together. It is true that the net may enable us to increasingly fragment as, say, territorial border-based societies, yet the need for trusted sources - be it aggregators, recommendations of friends, or major news media outlets - will continue to serve to bind societies together to an extent. Further, the ability for citizens to better specialise in particular areas (say, I'm an electronic music expert, and you are a connoisseur of jazz), may serve to enable greater interaction across societies and cultures.

The movement does not solely touch on a small, tech savvy elite. Instead, such new forms of cultural discourse are reshaping the way that we view our environment, media, and society. It can affect us on a micro-level (even if 20 people read one's blog, that's still 20 people more than before), or a macro-level (how many people saw the JibJab or BusUncle videos?), yet it is here to stay. Our culture, be it global or local - or more likely a rich, uncategorisable mixture of both - will never be the same.

Please note the article is published by Elizabeth Stark, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. Additionally, you are permitted to make derivative works from this article, on condition that you release any resulting work under similar terms. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact openDemocracy for permission and fees.

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• 'Atlantic' Finishes Rebranding Just In Time for Death of Print [Magazines] (Gawker)
• Free Culture conference in Berkeley in one week (BoingBoing)
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if anyone wants to jump on here and post stuff, please be my guest. the only criteria i have is that you be a student at the university of wisconsin (holler at the facebook group "UW Madison Students for Free Culture" to validate school status)

เริ่มจาก ไม่อ่านหนังสือ (paper), ไปทำแลปก็สายมาก, กลับบ้านก็เร็ว, หลบหน้าหลบตา Professor (my boss), เล่นอินเตอร์เน็ตทั้งวันทั้งคืน, ดูแต่หนัง

จะยอมแพ้ (give up school) ดีหรือเปล่า? 

ps. www.phdcomics.com

Free Culture should be a pretty interesting talk; speakers include professors from UC Berkeley and Stanford in the departments of law, information, and medicine; representatives from the Stanford Fair Use Project and Google; and John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla.  Throughout the day, there will be local DJs and games, and the night will end, I believe, with a party at Blake's on Telegraph.

"[Free Culture 2008 is] a conference for, and about, free culture, technology, copyright, remixing, and free software."

Free Culture 2008

Here are the details of the conference content, as posted on Free Culture Conference 2008's website:

WHAT: A conference with keynotes, talks, workshops, activism, and parties.

WHEN: Oct. 11th 2008, with a smaller and more focused student workshop day on Oct. 12th

WHERE: International House at Berkeley, University of California

WHY: It’s time for our community to spend time and learn from each other.

WHO: You, other free culture activists, professors, students, artists, musicians, coders, organizations like EFF and Creative Commons, and anyone interested in our community.

Students from all over the country as well as free culture enthusiasts will be flying in from all over the country, so if you're in the Berkeley area, you should check it out.  Details:

October 11th, 2008
10 AM—7 PM
Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave
Berkeley, CA 94720

The conference is co-organized by Students for Free Culture and Free Culture Berkeley.  One of my organizations, Students for Responsible Business, will be volunteering at the event.  See you there.

green dust blue

Originally uploaded by jamtea

its interesting though about the whole free-culture outside the US, it seems that free-culture is looking to be funded via the state. well at least all the admin operations, so does that mean that mechanism behind free-culture is fed through the government.

so the government build more trains for the first class passengers. i had hoped that free-culutre also means the right to do as you choose with what you create. yet being able to only license using the CC licenese and be a member of a rights organization outside the us does not make sense. it seems that ideas for artists might also move on the artists http://www.owntems.org the universal blanket license for eternity is sometimes to much for the artists. how about the universal blanket license for the local pub, that the artists can turn on and off when he feels like it?

Creative Commons might at least give merit to the other ideas, or would that be competition in a monopoly circumstance?

proove me wrong and put project applications in place via some of the CC affiliates outside of the US that are funded through the state to get moving on these kind of ideas? maybe i have it wrong though, another good pipe dream.

free-culture= free to do what you want with what you create.

not free to make it free only under a creative commons license, yet its interesting. i'm not worried about the CC license, yet maybe this article above shows an argument that might get thrown at you guys from time to time. how can you have a summit for free culutre within a blanket license and no definiftion within the law of what is non-commercial and what is commercial?

anyway i find it intersting, cause in all the time i have been using these CC liceses, i still can't get free legal advice. both sides seem the same as they have a political agenda, ultimatley the artists uses the tools that are available to her/him to get what they made heard. So i have to wonder if CC within the blanket admin of APRA is such a good thing. Is it not unfair to other licenes that might want to exist?

Who Is Behind the Curtain Supporting Orphan Works???

and on first click gave this  sentence "google and Microsoft" which linked to this article

1. Web firms quietly win copyright victory in Congress

-By John Letzing, MarketWatch Sept. 29, 2008

But it never really explains precisely why I should be against it. It only said to "connect the dots"

well i'm just to damn lazy to do it and so what if it is true that's not a good argument. Is It? Oh I don't know I guess since I don't make any money on my photography or Art or this blog I'm incline to not care so much.  But I think if you look at something like the Gutenburg Library you will find alot of people who are against the ridiculous copyright extensions that have been granted so companies like disney can keep making money through the hard work of the copyright lawyers and the legal system in general.

Here's a pro reform article

Here's Lessig's anti reform NY Times piece

What you see above, thanks to the steadfast picture-taking abilities of the talented Fred B, is perhaps the most awesome picture ever taken in the history of the Free Culture movement. It’s Henrik Moltke and Fritz Attaway, respectively co-director of the fantastic documentary Good Copy Bad Copy and vice-president of the MPAA, shaking hands after a screening.

Totally brilliant. And, as Fred points out on the picture’s Flickr entry — Fritz’s smile totally covers the fact that he’s suing students around the country up the wazoo. But, I think the image points to another thing. Was at the Berkman Center’s conference on the US vs. Microsoft antitrust case 10 years later — which featured journalists, lawyers, and people who worked on both sides of the case. But, the weird thing was, everyone was having a good laugh. The whole room was like a high school reunion, where the jocks jovially hang with the nerds and both recall fondly the time when they tried to destroy one another. Everyone understood the roles they had to play, and, as one attendee described it, it was like all those old cartoons with Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf where they genially greet each other before a day of epic conflict. This is a long way of saying: Free Culture has largely become cozy with the roles everyone expects it to play, and has been fighting the exact same fight for way too long. True: we’re wrongly pigeonholed as “just being about upper-middle class kids downloading music illegally,” but I don’t think it’s hard to see why people might think that, given the kinds of national campaigns that have dominated our activity for the past few years.

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In terms of relating this book and more specifically the chapter mentioned above suggests that generally in research, transforming or creating something new out of old information, is not illegal. Everything throughout history that has transformed our culture, has been taken from something else, it has been built upon something simpler.  In regards to research, the same idea applies, so what counts a piracy? Isn't everything piracy, since it came from something previous? Lessig argues that the government has allowed copyright laws to stifle and control the creativity of people. In the online movement, the main claim is not trying to determine whether or not copyright laws are bad but to understand how and why America has allowed the governments and corporations to take away the right to be creative (e.g. piracy vs. property). Although I didn't get a chance to actually watch the different genres on the online website, I do think that the visual mediums work better at persuaded people. But as far as the book goes, I think it does a better job at providing more history and compassion to the problem that Lessig suggests that we have. 

In their new book, Born Digital, John Palfrey and Urs Gassler discuss the generation of digital natives, described as those born after 1980, and how they interact with online knowledge, compared with the online experiences of digital immigrants.

The thesis of the book is that those in the youngest generation are more adept, more at home on the Internet. As someone who works with the small percentage of college grads in the millennial generation (only 29% of American adults have a bachelors' degree), age doesn't always reflect degree of online knowledge.

Siva Vaidhyanathan has taken issue with viewing those of a certain age as a generation, and specifically with "digital natives", arguing in a Chronicle article

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital" willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged. It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time, knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender, and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions about digital media.

Henry Jenkins also has issues with the digital native terminology:

Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Despite my own reservations about calling a generation "digital natives", this book has a wealth of information about what I would prefer to view as two separate, but occasionally overlapping groups, those comfortable and familiar with online and similar technologies, and those who are not yet adults -- with their still growing and developing brains.

The authors do discuss participatory culture and the intersection between creativity and copyright. There is a mention of fanworks like fanfiction in a section about mashups and creativity. But neither in the creativity or activism sections is there mention of fair use interspersed with the frequent mentions of copyright and ownership.

One of the sections that I found the most interesting was about libraries and librarians:

There's never been a greater need for reference librarians. . . . In addition to maintaining access to traditional pools of knowledge [books and journals], librarians should help Digital Natives figure out how to manage the rivers of digital information that they encounter every day [like RSS].

The role of libraries is increasing ... as Digital Natives up saturated in the information environment of the digital age.

One final note: While the text of the book is interesting, one of the most impressive aspects is the organization. Except for oddly leaving libraries out of the index, the supplemental backbone of the book (the index, selected bibliography, glossary, and notes/citation) help the reader to find useful information. I expect equally good information from the upcoming wiki.

Born Digital's ISBNs are 0465005152 9780465005154 & it can be found in many libraries.

First, he claims that Indonesia wants to keep virus sequences secret, to start a Global Pandemic:

When “Sovereignty” Risks Global Health
by Richard C. Holbrooke & Laurie Garrett

NEW YORK – Here’s a concept you’ve probably never heard of: “viral sovereignty.” This dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations – even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat to all the world’s peoples. Political leaders around the world should take note – and take very strong action.

But the problem is--and Richard knows better--is that Indonesia would be all to happy to give access to the virii as long as they would be able to manufacture the resulting vaccines under an open license. (See coverage here and here.) So I could just as well write a piece titled: Profits of Western Pharmaceutical Companies threaten Global Pandemic, because that is what the CDC's well announced plan is: to turn over all the sequences to a Pharmaceutical Company, and let them reap windfall profits on a blockbuster drug. Of course, to bad for those who can't afford the vaccines, they should just die. So sorry.

Clearly, the solution is this: government labs (or private labs under contract) develop the vaccine, and then license it to any pharmaceutical company qualified to manufacture it, as a generic. Open licensing. Equity. That is all Indonesia is asking for, Richard.

Of course that would have the benefit of making a quality vaccine widely available--but it would do the unforgivable--deny a pharmacuetical company somewhere a billion or two of profits.

Who--just who--are the terrorists?

If you're reading this for the first time and have no idea what it is all about, the wiki contains a lot more information. The whole idea basically started from a few of us (mostly CC-affiliated academics) thinking that we need a forum to exchange our ideas and findings on research pertaining to aspects of the digital commons. Then one thing led to another, and in what I think would make an exemplary case study of online collective action, we managed to set up Free Culture 2008 and generated enough interest to get everyone talking about a follow-up conference in 2009 (which, like the 2008 event, will not be limited to just CC-related topics). I will post more on these plans as soon as they start to take shape.