free culture

Why I love #fscons

For an academic, conferences are a way of life. At their best they are crossroads and meeting places between academics working either on the same topic or with the same method or theory. In the worst case they are an event where you meet the same people, talk about the same things and re-draw familiar battle lines. Don’t get me wrong even these “worst case” scenarios conferences are still valuable as they are all about meeting people.

But then there is FSCONS.

Once a year for five years my own workplace is transformed into the conference for free software and free culture. The participants are not their because they have papers to present but because they have ideas they want to spread. The audience are not there because they are working on developing their position in an academic hierarchy, but because they believe in the importance of the fundamental premise of the conference.

This is not to say that this is all about preaching to the converted. The audience is very dedicated, and knowledgeable about their topics. Take for example the first talks in the first session:
Karsten Gerloff “The Water in Which We Swim: Policy issues around Free Software”
Jeremiah Foster “Embedded Free Software/Open Source in your car”
Fredrik Gladhorn “Accessibility for Qt and KDE”
Daniel Berntsson “Bitcoin: Decentralised Currency”

And the whole conference continues in this way. The hard hackers meet and mingle with the digital rights activists.

In addition to this it’s all about the people. The relaxed social event to this evening was filled with a breadth of discussions. We had comparisons between 1984 & Brave New World, the cult of leadership & superstar CEOs, penicillin and yoghurt, hardware hacking & aduino, the role of royalty in free culture NCOs… Everywhere you turn their is a passionate group arguing intently on everything from the gender of Jabba the Hut & Admiral Akbar to the purpose, meaning and ability of democracy.

In a moment of strangeness a discussion turned to walls: their meaning, construction, definition and more importantly how to differentiate between walls and wall-like structures. Everyone had opinions and the light-hearted discussion continued for longer than such a question normally would or could last.

When I next checked on twitter I had been challenged to hold a lightening talk entitled: What is a wall?

How could anyone not love FSCONS?

Posted on by mklang

Free Culture Research Conference

The deadline for submissions of extended abstracts for the third Free Culture Research Conference (FCRC) is in 10 days. The conference this year will be in Berlin in October 8-9, 2010.

The Free Culture Research Conference presents a unique opportunity for scholars whose work contributes to the promotion, study or criticism of a Free Culture, to engage with a multidisciplinary group of academic peers and practitioners, identify the most important research opportunities and challenges, and attempt to chart the future of Free Culture. This event builds upon the successful workshop held in 2009 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, organized and attended by renowned scholars and research institutions from the US, Europe and Asia. The first event was held in Sapporo, Japan, in 2008, in conjunction with the 4th iCommons Summit. This year’s event is larger in ambition and scope, to provide more time for interaction in joint as well as break-out sessions. It is hosted jointly by the Free University of Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and will take place at October 8-9, 2010 at the Free University Campus in Berlin, in collaboration with COMMUNIA, the European Network on the digital public domain. Funding and support is also provided by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Check out the full call for papers here. For the sake of full disclosure I am on the Program Committee but their are many impressive names on the committee.

Posted on by mklang

Its here! FSCONS 2009

The greatest local event of the year is upon us. If you did not already know its time for the annual Free Software and Free Culture conference. The event is organised by two tireless friends of mine Jonas Öberg & Henrik Sandklef and this years FSCONS is an excellent example of why they really are the dynamic duo. The software and culture tracks appear in a nice mix (see schedule) and offer a wide range of intellectually challenging seminars and talks by pirates, politicians, aktivists, hackers, coders, geek girls, creators and the occasional academic.

My “must see” list is long but the highlights include: Edmund Harriss on Street Maths, Mikael Nordin on Cultural Transmission from an Archaeological Perspective, Christina Haralanova, on Free Software and Feminism & Christopher Kullenberg on Citizen’s Agenda: Net Neutrality, Surveillance and how to Re-build Politics

There will also be an event by the Julia Group (Tools for Determining Net Neutrality – An Activist Perspectve) the Nordic Free Software Award and lets not forget the social event of the year!

What can I say? its going to be a good weekend, so get over here and join in! There is always room for more Free Software/Free Culture nerds…

Posted on by mklang

The three main hurdles in the path of free culture

Today it’s the Free Culture Workshop at the Berkman Center (@ Harvard) in Boston and I was going to be there. Unfortunately I missed the whole thing because I had to attend a funeral in Stockholm instead. Check out the event. Here is a short position I was asked to write for the workshop, since I will not be using it I will post in here:

Social advances (albeit unequally distributed) have granted people the leisure time to focus on the production of non-essential products and services. Advances in technology have radically reduced the costs for preserving and communicating these cultural artifacts beyond the boundaries of time and space.  However it was not until the last 150 years where we have seen the technical and social advances necessary to enable widespread dispersion of the tools of cultural creation and communication to a wider group of users – the amateurs.

The oldest of these technologies is the art of reading and writing which challenged the status of memory. Plato was aware of the conflict and wrote about the art of writing in Phaedrus:

“…for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.  The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

This criticism tends to repeat itself with each new technology that redresses the shift of power among those who create culture and those who create culture with the aid of new technology. Arguments similar to those presented by Plato were used in the discussions of the relationships between photography and copyright. Mediating culture with technology brings about discussions on which of the forms of culture are more valuable and deserve protection.

In USA, after Congress amended the Copyright Act to include photography in 1865 the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony[1] discussed whether the photographer Sarony could have sole rights to his portrait of Oscar Wilde. The United States Supreme Court ruled that photographs could be “representatives of original intellectual conceptions of an author.” While in the UK the courts stated in the Graves’ Case, (1869)[2] that it was “…difficult to say what can be meant by an original photograph. All photographs are copies of some object.”

From these illustrations it is my intention to show that the discussions of culture, technology, value and protection are under constant discussion and movement and therefore are neither fixed nor moving in a linear development from one stage to the next. With the widespread dissemination of a cheap and simple (both terms to be take relatively) technology of digitalization coupled with an open communications infrastructure further barriers to amateur production of culture were removed.

This leads us up until today when the hurdles facing the individual wishing to become a cultural producer are no longer issues of time, economy or technical know-how. What are left are the two major barriers of creativity and copyright.  Since it is beyond my ability to discuss the creativity of others I shall limit myself to developing what is meant by the limiting factor of copyright on the creativity of individuals by presenting the three main copyright related hurdles to free culture. The three hurdles are FUD, DRM & copyfraud. The common factor for these three hurdles is that they prevent the free use of cultural material in the development of new cultural artifacts and since our common cultural heritage provides the “raw material” in cultural production the means to develop new material is seriously curtailed.

Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD)

The complexities of copyright have created a great deal of uncertainty among those actors attempting to create cultural artifacts while remaining within the limits of the law. The results of FUD favor inactivity since the perceived risks of violating copyright are seen as too great to risk. FUD is an important factor in different situations, for example: (1) where the creator intends to expose his/her product in a more formal setting e.g. a young film maker may easily add music or images to his/her film without permission but this will limit his/her ability to display the works to the public. (2) Orphaned works i.e. when the author of a work has been “lost” it becomes impossible to ask permission to reproduce and valuable cultural information is lost to the world. (3) The ability of museum and archives to reproduce or present their material to the world. At present the conflict between the National Gallery and Wikipedia provides an excellent illustration of this point.[3] The latter is a great source of concern to many public cultural heritage institutions.

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

In an attempt to ensure control over intellectual property many organizations and individuals are implementing digital protection measures. The goal of these measures is to ensure that the copying and spreading of copyrightable material is prevented. However these digital measures tend to create rights for the owners that often go beyond the fair use rights of those attempting to consume the cultural artifacts. In addition to this, legislation intended to prevent users from circumventing digital protection measures have been enacted in most jurisdictions. The effect of such legislation is to make moot whether or not the user has fair use rights under copyright since he/she is illegally circumventing a digital protection measure.

Copyfraud

The general state of confusion surrounding the extent of protection granted by copyright is being used (intentionally and unintentionally) to claim copyright over material which either may not be copyrightable or material for which the period of copyright protection has passed. These illegitimate limitations to the public domain may of course be contested in court but such actions are costly, entail an element of risk and favor the party with better lawyers. Therefore material, which under copyright legislation is available to all, is prevented from becoming part of our common cultural raw material that may be freely used.

[1] l l lU.S. 58 (1884).

[2] 4 L.R.Q.B. 715, 722

[3] BBC News “Wikipedia Painting Row Escalates” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8156268.stm?lsf

Posted on by mklang

The three hurdles in the path of free culture

Social advances (albeit unequally distributed) have granted people the leisure time to focus on the production of non-essential products and services. Advances in technology have radically reduced the costs for preserving and communicating these cultural artifacts beyond the boundaries of time and space. However it was not until the last 150 years where we have seen the technical and social advances necessary to enable widespread dispersion of the tools of cultural creation and communication to a wider group of users – the amateurs.
The oldest of these technologies is the art of reading and writing which challenged the status of memory. Plato was aware of the conflict and wrote about the art of writing in Phaedrus:

“…for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

This criticism tends to repeat itself with each new technology that redresses the shift of power among those who create culture and those who create culture with the aid of new technology. Arguments similar to those presented by Plato were used in the discussions of the relationships between photography and copyright. Mediating culture with technology brings about discussions on which of the forms of culture are more valuable and deserve protection.

In USA, after Congress amended the Copyright Act to include photography in 1865 the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony discussed whether the photographer Sarony could have sole rights to his portrait of Oscar Wilde. The United States Supreme Court ruled that photographs could be “representatives of original intellectual conceptions of an author.” While in the UK the courts stated in the Graves’ Case (1869) LR 4 QB 715 (a case under the Fine Arts Copyright Act 1862 dealing with a photograph of an engraving) that it was “…difficult to say what can be meant by an original photograph. All photographs are copies of some object.”

From these illustrations it is my intention to show that the discussions of culture, technology, value and protection are under constant discussion and movement and therefore are neither fixed nor moving in a linear development from one stage to the next. With the widespread dissemination of a cheap and simple (both terms to be take relatively) technology of digitalization coupled with an open communications infrastructure further barriers to amateur production of culture were removed.

This leads us up until today when the hurdles facing the individual wishing to become a cultural producer are no longer issues of time, economy or technical know-how. What are left are the two major barriers of creativity and copyright. Since it is beyond my ability to discuss the creativity of others I shall limit myself to developing what is meant by the limiting factor of copyright on the creativity of individuals by presenting the three main copyright related hurdles to free culture. The three hurdles are FUD, DRM & copyfraud. The common factor for these three hurdles is that they prevent the free use of cultural material in the development of new cultural artifacts and since our common cultural heritage provides the “raw material” in cultural production the means to develop new material is seriously curtailed.

Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD)
The complexities of copyright have created a great deal of uncertainty among those actors attempting to create cultural artifacts while remaining within the limits of the law. The results of FUD favor inactivity since the perceived risks of violating copyright are seen as too great to risk. FUD is an important factor in different situations, for example: (1) where the creator intends to expose his/her product in a more formal setting e.g. a young film maker may easily add music or images to his/her film without permission but this will limit his/her ability to display the works to the public. (2) Orphaned works i.e. when the author of a work has been “lost” it becomes impossible to ask permission to reproduce and valuable cultural information is lost to the world. (3) The ability of museum and archives to reproduce or present their material to the world. At present the conflict between the National Gallery and Wikipedia provides an excellent illustration of this point. The latter is a great source of concern to many public cultural heritage institutions.

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)
In an attempt to ensure control over intellectual property many organizations and individuals are implementing digital protection measures. The goal of these measures is to ensure that the copying and spreading of copyrightable material is prevented. However these digital measures tend to create rights for the owners that often go beyond the fair use rights of those attempting to consume the cultural artifacts. In addition to this, legislation intended to prevent users from circumventing digital protection measures have been enacted in most jurisdictions. The effect of such legislation is to make moot whether or not the user has fair use rights under copyright since he/she is illegally circumventing a digital protection measure.

Copyfraud
The general state of confusion surrounding the extent of protection granted by copyright is being used (intentionally and unintentionally) to claim copyright over material which either may not be copyrightable or material for which the period of copyright protection has passed. These illegitimate limitations to the public domain may of course be contested in court but such actions are costly, entail an element of risk and favor the party with better lawyers. Therefore material, which under copyright legislation is available to all, is prevented from becoming part of our common cultural raw material that may be freely used.

Posted on by mklang

The 2009 idea award

The Foundation for Free Culture and Software (“Föreningen fri kultur och programvara”) is a local initiative whose goal it is to “spread awareness about free culture and free software, as well as support organisations, individuals and projects with the same goals.” We’re organised around our many activities, which are run by the members of the foundation. Oh, and disclosure I am a board member.

Anyway, in order to promote creative thinking and to show that results can be achieved even with limited resources the foundation has now announced its Idea prize for 2009. We will be awarding two prizes of 10 000 kr each for innovative ideas.The prizes will be judged on doability, innovation, relevans and creativity. The money will be awarded to enable the project to be carried out.

Posted on by mklang