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Free Culture spokenFree Culture spokenFree Culture spoken 04/09/2004 04:06 PM This has amazed even me. AKMA asked whether a free audio version of Free Culture can be built. Joi seconded the idea, and one day later, ten chapters are claimed. Doug Kaye of ITConversations has already recorded chapter one -- Creators. Noncommercial derivative works, and maybe even a competition in versions (I want to record a chapter!). Very cool. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Free Culture spokenGrok Headline matches for Free Culture spokenFree Culture!Free Culture! 10/28/2003 11:07 PM I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download. Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing. Free CultureFree Culture 04/09/2004 04:11 PM Free Culture in 100 wordsFree Culture in 100 words 04/09/2004 04:11 PM Since no one has the time to read books anymore, I used the text version of Lessig's new book, Free Culture, and Word's AutoSummary feature (like I did with the Matrix thread) to produce a ~100 word summary of the 368 page book: FREE CULTURE"PROPERTY"The copyright warriors are right: A copyright is a kind of property. First, about copyright. That copyright is their property. America copied English copyright law. Actually,... Free Culture classFree Culture class 04/09/2004 04:06 PM Lawrence Solum (who has entered an elite status after Vint Cerf gave a paper praising his Layer s Principle paper) is running a blog-class this week on Free Culture. Follow along (as I will be) and learn. A Wikipedia of Free Culture?A Wikipedia of Free Culture? 07/02/2004 03:32 AM Q: How to plan a wiki?
So we set up a wiki and we're holding a barn raising there. You're invited. Our objective is to plan a "Get Content" wiki, a scalable catalog of "some rights reserved" and "no rights reserved" works. A truly international catalog of CC and PD works. A Wikipedia of Free Culture, democratically maintained and curated. Can this work? We have a hunch that it can, but we've doubtless missed many solutions and innumerable problems. What we have thought of is of course on the wiki, where you should go without further adieu and add your ideas. Note for anyone excited about the idea: we're planning at this stage. The wiki we're using for the planning may not be the one we use to implement the "Get Content" wiki (do help us figure that one out) -- so you may wish to curb your enthusiasm for raw cataloging just right now. Now dive in! Free Culture formatsFree Culture formats 04/09/2004 04:06 PM The free Free Culture was released as a pdf under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. Some complained about the format. Others, relying upon the freedom granted, created derivative works in other formats. So far, 36 hours after the book was released, I know of 9 versions available, including: MS-re ader, Rocke t e-Book, zippe d, iSilo , Mobip ocket, EasyR ead, PostScri pt, Pl ain Text, html. Most of these are from Blackmask, but thanks to Firas, Mike and Josh as well. Free Culture reviewsFree Culture reviews 04/09/2004 04:06 PM Reviews for Free Culture are here, with comment space and an 
RSS feed too. Wiki for Free CultureWiki for Free Culture 07/12/2004 08:59 AM Creative Commons is experimenting with using a wiki to discuss using a wiki to maintain a Wikipedia of sorts for Free Culture. Drop by and give us your thoughts.... Free Culture at ILAWFree Culture at ILAW 05/14/2004 03:12 PM Chairman and co-founder of Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, spent most of this week speaking at the ILAW conference at Harvard. There are some great notes and transcripts on Furdlog and Copyfight of Lessig's "Free Culture" talk. There are a lot of great questions from the moderator and audience, and a lot of great ideas being debated. Free Culture On TourFree Culture On Tour 03/19/2005 03:27 AM Free Culture may be visiting a college, youth media group, or festival near you. Brooklyn-based artist Colin Mutchler, in partnership with FreeCulture.org, has launched a five-week tour which kicked off last week at South by Southwest. The Free Culture show mixes music, images, and spoken word to demonstrate the complex and entertaining cross section between cultural property and freedom. Check it out! Free Culture liveFree Culture live 09/10/2004 04:26 PM Colin Mutchler, featured in our second Creative Commons movie "Reticulum Rex", is giving a live performance of his audio/visual work called "Free Culture" September 15th in Brooklyn, NY. "Sourced by Larry Lessig and his new book of the same name, Free Culture is multimedia performance by Brooklyn based artist Colin Mutchler that mixes music, image, video and spoken word to speak his personal journey, both physically and digitally, through the last four years. " The Free Culture debateThe Free Culture debate 02/11/2004 09:39 AM James DeLong responds to my post about the Free Culture Movement (FCM) and property rights. He steps back from his earlier statements and acknowledges that, yes, there are elements of the movement, such as Creative Commons, that work within the property rights system. For that I give him credit. I don't agree with his stark division of the FCM into "BSD Licence" activities that respect property rights and "GPL" activities that seek to overthrow them, but I won't be ungrateful. It's a much more nuanced and accurate view that what he started with. If we can spend our energy debating the substance of the issues -- which sets of rules better promote economic efficiency, freedom, and innovation -- we may make some progress. To my mind, the genius of people like Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler is that, unlike the prior "copyleft" generation represented by GPL creator Richard Stallman, they are able to engage on their opponents' own turf as well as from the outside. What set me off about DeLong's original post was the unwillingness to accept that fact, by labeling the whole movement as opposed to property rights. DeLong takes umbrage at my use of the term "copyright maximalists." First of all, I didn't apply that label to him -- I was thinking more of Jack Valenti. As DeLong makes clear in his followup post, he appreciates that property rights have limits: "It is clear as
a matter of historical experience
and common sense that property rights get cut and trimmed to fit the
technological and transaction-cost realities of the age."
Unfortunately, many of the business and political interests in the digital content debates fail to acknowledge this point. The movie industry, for example, has voiciferously promoted its conception of its intellectual property rights as morally sacrosanct, now and forever. One key rhetorical move they make in doing so is to label anyone who questions their viewpoint as a communist and/or a pirate. (I'm not sure which is the greater insult.) You either support the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act... or you're in the dustbin of history with Lenin and Trotsky. In a political battle, demonizing the opposition can be very effective. I'm sure this wasn't what motivated DeLong's original post. But to a reader, his sweeping generalization had that ring. De Long succinctly (if inadvertantly) shows the core problem: "The FCM should be making important contributions
to the process of redefinition, but so far what we hear from it is why
property rights are bad, in whatever context happens to be under
discussion at the moment, except, perhaps, for the spectrum problem
mentioned by Werbach."
I see a similar problem on the other side: property rights defenders reflexively attacking alternative production models and technology-necessitated limitations on rights. Does that describe all opponents of the FCM? Of course not. But the thoughtful ones such as DeLong are letting themselves become intellectual cover for the extremists. That's why this meta-debate matters. In the confines of the academy, we all trust each other's intellectual honesty and can have a nice conversation. DeLong points to Polk Wagner, who has done excellent work attacking the point of view that I support. I see Polk once a month at a Philly-area gathering of cyberlaw afficionados. We find common ground on some substantive points and disagree on others, but I always respect his perspective. In my forthcoming spectrum paper, I engage with other brilliant scholars like Howard Shelanski and Stuart Benjamin who have written in the area. That's the nature of intellectual debate -- different sides advance claims and challenge one another. The cold reality is that the Free Culture battle isn't just being fought in the halls of academe. The scholarly discussion is part of a larger debate taking place in Congress, the courts, corporate board rooms, and the realm of public opinion. We simply can't ignore the consequences of labeling opponents with too broad brush. Free Culture and Property RightsFree Culture and Property Rights 02/10/2004 02:47 AM Over at the Progress and Freedom Foundation blog, James DeLong attempts to prove that the "Free Culture Movement" (FCM) led by people like Larry Lessig is part and parcel of the political left: "The FCM does
not think that production and
consumption of intellectual creations should be organized by property
rights and markets. Instead, it favors a mechanism of production based
on the open source software movement...."
This is a nice case of simply asserting
what the author is allegedly attempting to prove. In fact, Free
Culture is eminently consistent with markets and property
rights.
Lessig's Creative Commons and successful open source projects are
based
on well-defined software licenses. In other words, property
rights that function in a market. The network infrastructure
piece of Free Culture, open spectrum is expressly built on the idea of
a market in wireless devices replacing a system of government spectrum
micro-management. And it was the Framers of the US Constitution,
hardly anti-property radicals, who decreed that copyrights be for a
limited period of time. The property rights maximalists are the true radicals here. They have defined any challenges to the status quo as a frontal attack on property rights. As political propaganda, this effort may have some success. But the ultimate strength of the Free Culture Movement, or whatever one calls it, lies in this: It is an internal critique of the dominant ideology, not an external challenge to markets like communism. The Free Culture proponents, who offer suggestions like returning to the copyright terms of the 1790s, are the true conservatives in this debate. Woody Guthrie free cultureWoody Guthrie free culture 04/09/2004 03:54 PM Joel Blain recently wrote in with an interesting observation: "I've been reading a bio on Woody Guthrie. It's pretty interesting. The book reprints one of the "Copyright Warnings" he included on his recordings in the ealry 40's "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." It just made me think of Creative Commons. I dunno if you've seen or heard it before, but I thought I'd pass it along." Nice find, thanks Joel! Something for Nothing: The Free Culture
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Q: "In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform
and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a
few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got
to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving
this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
