Carving Out A Free Culture Agenda
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.
What I’m trying to say isn’t anything like that Free Culture hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile. It’s just stalled on the national level as the times have changed. For sure, local chapters have continued to stay active in their communities, and in places like New York, they’ve become powerful places where art, innovation, and technology communities interface with one another. But in promoting widespread action, staying at the forefront as technological issues spill outwards into different innovation communities, and taking aggressive and coordinated public action — the national organization as a whole has been quiet.
I think Free Culture runs the risk of irrelevance. It’s hesitated affirmatively in defining an agenda beyond a general “we’ll know it when we see it” because it of course doesn’t make sense to try to force bureaucracy or dogmatism onto something when it isn’t needed. But, in backing off too completely in defining a mission, and allowing our online spaces to be crowded with the same tired arguments instead of looking for places for agreement and collaboration, I think at present Free Culture, at least on the national level, has sabotaged its potential to become a leading force in activism on these issues. This is not for lack of trying or resources, of course — I don’t think this is anyone’s fault — just that the community as a whole has been stuck in a rut. I think the national conference in October is in many ways a crossroads, and that a failure to articulate a vision (or at least some agreed-on goals), will lead to increasing isolation as other organizations fill the spaces Free Culture fails to. It’s a big time.
It’s irresponsible, obviously, to complain without suggestions of what is worthwhile doing. Here are some national projects that I’d love to see Free Culture pursue that haven’t seen much attention.
1) Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works
Sure, we might not agree on the minuate of fair use, but everyone seems to agree that Girl Talk’s work should be defended. Same goes for other artists experimenting with the same methods that threaten the current mode of fair use. Free Culture should create a public list of people and works who are affirmatively protected by the threat of activism. Any organization that goes after them to shut down what is obviously a huge creative boon from remixing and reuse, FC can promise to retaliate against. FC will seed torrents, mass distribute copies, encourage further remixing, and bring in the involvement of litigators working in the space. In other words, we will be a major pain in the ass.
2) Connect With the Development Community
The development community has been wrangling increasingly with Free Culture issues, and there’s a host of natural allies to bring into a project. Many of these, particularly the UAEM community, have demonstrated the efficacy of student activists working in the university space to promote more sensible IP frameworks for innovation. As Benkler has pointed out, Free Culture is far from being limited to a first world issue: access to medicine, technology, and know-how in the developing world is increasingly dependent on an obsolete system of IP that needs resolving. However, no large student group currently acts broadly in the space, though FC is ideally suited to do such a thing.
3) Encourage Open Access Nationally
With the passing of the Open Access resolution at Harvard and efforts at MIT and Stanford, the space now exists for IP freedom activists to begin a full-scale mobilization to promote better public access to educational materials around the country. Many of the technical tools and organizational models to implement this are now being tested in these universities, and the sharing of these practices among student activists massively lowers the cost to universities who are trying to find their way with Open Access. Shooting towards an eventual goal of creating a nationally linked repository of Open Access materials from colleges around the country seems like an obvious resource to aim to create.
4) Promote Data Portability
Free and Open Source Software has been a broadly shared axe to grind for some time now with a bunch of organizations, but it seems like structurally, the salient issue in coming years won’t be merely making code free, but to advocate for data being portable. As the market largely moves towards tethered devices and thin client models, the question of freedom doesn’t turn so much on whether or not a particular software is free or open source — after all Google mostly doesn’t care if you want to go in and see how things work. All the forward-thinking tech company wants is for A) that product to be used, even at the cost of offering it for free, and B) that the data and hosting is kept with them. The real threat to freedom and innovation — as Zittrain’s pointed out — is that data is locked up remotely and that software on platforms increasingly becomes service. What does it mean when Apple can remotely shut down products, or can make movement to another service essentially impossible by raising the barriers to transferring personal information? At least within FC, no one’s been pushing hard on this point, and I think it’s an incredibly salient issue for the community to get involved in.
