Register now for LibrePlanet and Free Culture X 2013!

Two conferences are just around the corner that fellow free software and free culture advocates, hackers, curious technology users, and critical media participants won't want to miss. LibrePlanet and Free Culture X 2013 are two really exciting conferences at the intersection of technology, social justice, and media studies.

LibrePlanet is the Free Software Foundation's annual conference, this year titled "Commit Change", and will take place at the Harvard University Science Center on March 23rd & 24th 2013 or, in other words, very very soon! Free Culture X 2013 is this year's Students for Free Culture conference and will take place April 20th & 21st at New York Law School. 

What can you expect at each? 

LibrePlanet has a lot to offer people from different areas of expertise with varying levels of experience in free software. Whether you're interested in the profound social implications of software ownership, producing and sharing media with free technologies, or harnessing your own power over the computers around you as a hacker, you can get a lot out of  meeting fellow conference-goers and attending the talks and workshops at LibrePlanet. 

Registration is free for FSF Associate Members, or $90 otherwise. Discounted rates are available for students or for a single-day pass, and of course volunteering is a great way to get in at no cost at all! If you are unable to attend, there will be a live broadcast of the event online.

Free Culture X 2013 is half conference, with one day of talks and panels by brilliant minds challenging media monopolies and permission culture, and half unconference, with participatory workshops and working groups.

Registration is 100% pay-what-you-want, with a suggested donation of $15.00. Proceeds from the conference will help defray the costs of running a nonprofit, so please support as much as you can!

Both conferences will be very accessible and you should absolutely come if you are able. If you can't come, consider following along with the live webcast, participating in discussions during the events through social media, spreading the word now for others to attend, and donating if free software and free culture are valuable to you.

The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of the NC and ND clauses

This is a follow-up to "Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0" but instead of focusing on the problems with NC and ND, the editorial draws upon defenses of NC and ND to highlight how they go against the stated mission of Creative Commons. You can also read the original post on ​QuestionCopyright.org.

A few weeks ago, Students for Free Culture published a detailed and thoroughly cited post calling for the retirement of proprietary license options in Creative Commons 4.0. Already the story has been picked up by Techdirt and Slashdot and it has spurred lots of heated debate around the value of the NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND) licenses to Creative Commons and to rightsholders, but not a lot of discussion has been framed around the official mission and vision of Creative Commons.

Creative Commons has responded to the post stating that adopters of NC and ND licenses "may eventually migrate to more open licenses once exposed to the benefits that accompany sharing," maintaining that these licenses have been a strategic measure to approach that goal. The name Creative Commons itself highlights the aim of enabling a network of ideas and expressions that are commonly shared and owned or, as we usually call it, the commons. To be very explicit, one need not look any further than Creative Commons' mission statement (added emphasis) to see that this is what they work for:

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.

The NC and ND clauses are non-free/proprietary because they retain a commercial and/or creative monopoly on the work. Legally protected monopolies by any other name are still incompatible with the commons and undermine commonality. There is no question as to the purpose of Creative Commons or the definition of free cultural works. What Students for Free Culture has offered is not primarily a critique of proprietary licenses, but a critique of Creative Commons' tactics in providing them. The idea that the non-free licenses "may eventually migrate to more open licenses once exposed to the benefits that accompany sharing" is a reasonable one, but one that deserves careful reflection after a decade of taking that approach.

This line of reasoning is intuitive in a permission culture: that license options which sound good to rightsholders will lure them into giving up some restrictions licenses and becoming more comfortable with the idea of fully liberating their works. Encouraging the use of free culture licenses then becomes a problem of education and communication of values, and the question then becomes whether or not the proprietary licenses make that task easier or more difficult.

Some argue that rightsholders are not ready for free culture and that they need to be eased into it. Anecdotal arguments supporting this idea say that people switch to free licenses from the non-free ones once they learn about how problematic NC and NC are, but there is no evidence to support this claim. We have no idea how strong Creative Commons' campaign for free licenses would be if they only provided free culture licenses from the start, and Students for Free Culture suggest that in the current climate of copyright and intellectual property maximalism, what we need is to stretch what is accepted as reasonable position to take, not sit comfortably within it.

It may be counter-intuitive that only offering free culture licenses would bring more rightsholders to liberate their works over time, but if we consider that this would allow Creative Commons to have a cohesive message behind the licenses they do offer, we can imagine their educational materials could be much more powerful. More importantly, they would be expanding the perceived realm of possibility. Students for Free Culture argue that the proprietary licenses are mainly used because they are misunderstood and function to reinforce those misconceptions rather than move rightsholders towards free culture. It is analogous to telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils to ease them out of supporting a two-party political system. It may seem practical and appear to bring more steady and reliable change, but it only serves to reinforce the status quo.

The popular criticisms of the post are actually very revealing of this very idea.

All of the defenses of proprietary clauses which have been raised in the recent debate boil down to these types of arguments: that everything should be CC-licensed because it is better than "all rights reserved"; that Creative Commons needs to support all the options that rightsholders want; that not providing more license options is restricting freedom; and that the non-free clauses do serve worthwhile purposes even if they are oppose free culture. These arguments are all problematic in ways either explicitly mentioned or linked to from the original post, and underscore how much extra work this makes for Creative Commons.

The everything-should-be-CC-licensed argument:

• "Big media could adopt NC or ND, but not free culture licenses"
• "So much is already similarly available, it should all be CC"
• "The purpose of Creative Commons is to provide a diversity of options"
• "Creative Commons isn't an ideological organization about free culture"

These arguments fail to see the mission of Creative Commons and ignores that for years they have been moving away from providing more options in favor of promoting their free culture licenses. Creative Commons does not exist to provide a licensing option for every possible desire of rightholders, nor does it exist to slap a CC logo on every work released under terms similar to what license options they could or currently do offer. We can keep licenses that big media may use for the sake of meaningless adoption, or we can focus on the licenses that subvert intellectual monopolies. Creative Commons could have moved towards being a highly-flexible modular licensing platform that enabled rightsholders to fine-tune the exact rights they wished to grant on their works, but there's a reason that didn't happen. We would be left with a plethora of incompatible puddles of culture. Copyright already gives rightsholdors all of the power. Creative Commons tries to offer a few simple options not merely to make the lives of rightsholders easier, but to do so towards the ends of creating a commons. By its very name, Creative Commons does promote an ideology.
The freedom of choice argument:

• "Everyone's freedom should be respected"
• "This is an effort to dictate our license choices"
• "Promoting freedom by taking away choices is hypocritical"
• "This is just one definition of freedom"

Right off the bat, these arguments miss the fact that the old proprietary licenses will still exist and can be forked and updated, but that is beside the point. They not only confuse different freedoms but, in doing so, also value the legally granted right to restrict freedom over the freedom to be free from those very restrictions. This is the foundation of permission culture and the antithesis of the commons.

The NC-and-ND-clauses-are-useful argument:

• "They serve a purpose even though they aren't free"
• "A vague protection is better than nothing"
• "These protect us from big media stealing our work"
• "Not everyone wants to use a free culture license"

These arguments all seem to be built around the popular discontent with today's draconian copyright regime, yet they are at the same time apologetic towards the permission culture which enables it. While NC and ND appear to empower creators to retain control over their work, it is crucial to remember what copyright is: a legal construct of private property and, more specifically, a monopoly. Distributing these innumerable government-granted monopolies, even to individuals, only leads to monopolistic organizations that amass ownership and control over huge sums of our culture. Again, Creative Commons could have provided a totally customizable framework for rightsholders to pick what rights to grant for each of their works, but copyright already gives them that power. Making it easier to do only validates the fears that made copyright what it is today. Take, for example, the Free Software Foundation. If they had advocated for any proprietary software/licenses that were anything "better" than the terms that Windows and OS X are distributed under, the world would not be as open to the idea of free software as it is today.

These three types of arguments exclude those that have been made purely concerned with the interests of rightsholders and the many many interesting and creative misunderstandings of the license terms and enforceability. This all serves to indicate that Creative Commons' current strategy is working against all of the great work they do promoting a freer culture. People don't need to be convinced that copyright is a broken system. Instead, Creative Commons should be focusing on affecting what people believe is an acceptable position, showing the world that much more is possible, and proving that we can and are building a free culture.

Creative Commons is at a very important philosophical and tactical crossroads. The crux of the concern raised by Students for Free Culture comes down to weather Creative Commons will be locked in by pressures to serve the interests of rightsholders or be committed to a strategic standard promoting free licensing towards the creation of an indivisible and shared commons. The drafting of version 4.0 of the licenses may be the best and last opportunity to make such a dramatic change, which underlines the urgency of the suggestion. Creative Commons is perfectly positioned to critically reevaluate its strategy and make a change that more effectively promotes its mission, so please heed Students for Free Culture's call to action:

• Send a letter to the Creative Commons Board of Directors about your concerns.
• Publish your letter or a blog post on the issue (and send it to the list below)
• Join the Creative Commons licenses development list to participate in discussions of the 4.0 draft: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
• Contribute to the CC 4.0 wiki pages: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0

 This is crossposted from the Students for Free Culture blog: http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/

Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0's final release.

The concept of free culture has its roots in the history of free software (popularly marketed as "open source software"), and it’s an important philosophical underpinning to the CC license set. As with free software, the word "free" in free culture means free as in freedom, not as in price, but Creative Commons has not set or adhered to any standard or promise of rights or taken any ethical position in their support of a free culture. The definition of free cultural works describes the necessary freedoms to ensure that media monopolies cannot form to restrict the creative and expressive freedoms of others and outlines which restrictions are permissible or not. Although Creative Commons provides non-free licenses, the fact that they recognize the definition reveals a willingness and even desire to change.

Creative Commons started off by focusing much more on flexibility for rightsholders, but since its early days, the organization has moved away from that position. Several projects and licenses have been retired such as the Sampling, Founders' Copyright, and Developing Nations License. It's obvious that something like Founders' Copyright which keeps "all rights reserved" for 14 years (before releasing into the public domain) is not promoting free culture. Giving rightsholders more options and easier ways to choose what rights they want to give others actually reinforces permission culture, creates a fragmented commons, and takes away freedom from all cultural participants.

What's wrong with NC and ND?

The two proprietary clauses remaining in the CC license set are NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND), and it is time Creative Commons stopped supporting them, too. Neither of them provide better protection against misappropriation than free culture licenses. The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing derivatives are either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses. The NC clause is vague and survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders' fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use? Where is the line drawn between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn't. It does not increase the potential profit from work and it does not provide any better protection than than Copyleft does (using the ShareAlike clause on its own, which is a free culture license).

The second idea is the misconception that NC is anti-property or anti-privatization. This comes from the name NonCommercial which implies a Good Thing (non-profit), but it's function is counter-intuitive and completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work). That is what it comes down to. The NC clause is actually the closest to traditional "all rights reserved" copyright because it treats creative and intellectual expressions as private property. Maintaining commercial monopolies on cultural works only enables middlemen to continue enforcing outdated business models and the restrictions they depend on. We can only evolve beyond that if we abandon commercial monopolies, eliminating the possibility of middlemen amassing control over vast pools of our culture.

Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute to a shared commons. They oppose it. The fact that the ND clause prevents cultural participants from building upon works should be a clear reason to eliminate it from the Creative Commons license set. The ND clause is already the least popular, and discouraging remixing is obviously contrary to a free culture. The NonCommercial clause, on the other hand, is even more problematic because it is not so obvious in its proprietary nature. While it has always been a popular clause, it's use has been in slow and steady decline.

Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be impossible to sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia and reach communities without internet access because every single editor of Wikipedia would need to give permission for their work to be sold. The project would need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven possible), but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for almost all projects, especially for physical copies. Retaining support for NC and ND in CC 4.0 would give them much more weight, making it extremely difficult to retire them later, and continue to feed the fears that nurture a permission culture.

Why does this need to happen now?

People have been vocal about this issue for a long time, and awareness of the problematic nature of ND and NC has been spreading, especially in the areas of Open Educational Resources (such as OpenCourseWare) and Open Access to research. With the percentage of CC-licensed works that permit remixing and commercial use having doubled since Creative Commons' first year, it's clear that there is a growing recognition that the non-free license clauses are not actually necessary, or even good.

Both NC and ND are incompatible with free licenses and many, if not the vast majority, of NC and ND licensed works will not be relicensed after CC 4.0, so the longer it takes to phase out those clauses, the more works will be locked into a proprietary license. There will never be a better time than this. Creative Commons has been shifting away from non-free licenses for several years, but if it does not abandon them entirely it will fail as a commons and divide our culture into disconnected parts, each with its own distinct licence, rights and permissions granted by the copyright holders who 'own' the works.

In December of 2006, Creative Commons implemented a subtle difference between the pages for free culture and non-free licenses: green and yellow background graphics (compare Attribution-ShareAlike to Attribution-NonCommercial). This was also when they began using license buttons that include license property icons, so that there would be an immediate visual cue as to the specific license being used before clicking through to the deed. In February of 2008, they began using a seal on free culture licenses that said "Approved for Free Cultural Works", which was another great step in the right direction. In July of this year, Creative Commons released a completely redesigned license chooser that explicitly says whether the configuration being used is free culture or not. This growing acknowledgement of free vs. non-free licenses was a crucial development, since being under a Creative Commons license is so often equated with being a free cultural work. Now, retiring the NC and ND clauses is a critical step in Creative Commons' progress towards taking a pro-freedom approach.

The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function. With that knowledge, it would be a mistake not to retire them. Creative Commons should not depend on and nurture rightsholders' fears of misappropriation to entice them into choosing non-free CC licenses. Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense. We are in the perfect position to finally create a unified and undivided commons. Creative Commons is at a crossroads.This decisive moment will in all likelihood bind their direction either being stuck serving the fears that validate permission culture or creating a shared commons between all cultural participants.

We don't want the next generation of the free culture movement to be saddled with the dichotomies of the past; we want our efforts to be spent fighting the next battles.

What should we do?

There have been lots of discussions on the CC-license list about promoting free culture licenses and discouraging proprietary ones. A couple of proposals have been made to encourage the use of free licenses over the non-free ones.

One is a rebranding of the non-free licenses. They could be differentiated in a much more significant way than it currently is, such as referring to NC and ND as the "Restricted Commons" or "Limited Commons" or some variant thereof. License buttons could also be color coded in the same way that license pages are (green for free culture licenses, yellow for proprietary ones). Another proposal is to rename NonCommercial to something more honest such as CommercialMonopoly.

While these proposals and other ideas are certainly worth supporting, we should not lose sight on our ultimate goal: for Creative Commons to stop supporting non-free licenses. We should not feel like this is impossible to achieve at this point, as it will be much more difficult to do later. More people than ever are starting to advocate against proprietary CC licenses, and there is clear evidence and reasoning behind these arguments. We have the power to prevent the inclusion of non-free clauses in this upcoming version of the Creative Commons License set.

To join us in resisting the inclusion of proprietary clauses in CC 4.0, there are a few important things you can do:

• Send a letter to the Creative Commons Board of Directors about your concerns.
• Publish your letter or a blog post on the issue (and send it to the list below)
• Join the Creative Commons licenses development list to participate in discussions of the 4.0 draft: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
• Contribute to the CC 4.0 wiki pages: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0

Last chance to fund Tube, an upcoming Blender-animated film

Blender's Open Movie Projects have already proved that it's possible to produce stunningly high-quality 3D animated films exclusively using free software in a studio setting. Now, a new animated short film called Tube, inspired by the ancient epic poem of Gilgamesh, is expanding on that work to bring free culture to the masses. The Tube project is not merely evidence of the technical capabilities of free software tools like Blender, PiTiVi, and Fedora GNU/Linux, but living proof of their viability for independent filmmakers. The most impressive aspect of the project is that it has managed to come together through distributed collaboration between 56 artists from 22 countries — some of which are at war. Tube truly highlights the incredible unifying power of free software tools and a free culture model. 

Within the first few days, Tube's Kickstarter campaign reached the minimal baseline goal of $22K and subsequently hit Slashdot. As the film enters the final stages of production, the Tube team needs as much support as they can get to make this story a huge success for free software, free culture, and independent animators everywhere. With the production funding target of $50K in sight and just a couple days left in the campaign, this is your last chance to support this ambitious undertaking and get your name in the film as a backer. There is enormous potential here; as Mashable questions, 'Will This Open-Source Animated Film Change the Movie Industry Forever?'

The film's public release is scheduled for 7 months from now along with all the assets, source, and project files under the free culture and copyleft Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licence. For an in-depth discussion with the team, check out this interview with the Tube project founders on Libre Graphics World. It's up to us now to help Tube affirm the legitimacy of producing free cultural works in a fully free software workflow. 

Delete Your Facebook for Your Birthday

As the need for free (as in freedom) tools to communicate and socialize becomes increasingly urgent, more projects have been popping up to take up the challenge: GNU social and StatusNet, Crabgrass, Apache Wave, and more. The list goes on, and on. If you're not yet familiar with the issue, or even if you are, you should watch this excellent talk by Eben Moglen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gORNmfpD0ak

The first step towards digital autonomy is of course to stop using services that restrict your freedom, whether they do so through unfair terms of service, disregard for your privacy, locking you in, and/or any other means. Facebook is the biggest and baddest right now, so it's a great place to start. If you're like most Facebook users, you're probably thinking something along the lines of "This is great, but I could never afford to delete my Facebook account". Really though, it isn't that bad. Instead of just having one central web service you rely on, you'll just be spread out on what you're already using (phone, text, IM, email), and perhaps picking up some new tools. It is a small sacrifice, but sometimes, what's slightly more convenient to you as an individual, is extremely harmful to society on a large scale. 

So, if you're willing to do it, there's really no better time to delete your Facebook account than on your birthday. All your friends will be coming to your page to post a quick "happy birthday" note on your wall, only to find that they can't, and that you'll be leaving. It's a great way to maximize your impact, and make sure everyone has other ways to contact you. 

It's easy: 

Step 1:  A while in advance (a week or more before your birthday) - Create a Facebook event for your birthday alerting people of your decision and why. Go ahead and copy the text I used for my event: 

For my birthday, I am permanently deleting (not decativating, so I won't be able to restore) my Facebook account. The day after this event, I will export all of my data and my account will be gone! 

If you want to keep in touch, here's how you can: 

Email: [your email here]

Phone/text: [your number here]

IM (Jabber/Google Talk): [your Jabber ID here]

[other]: [your other contact here]

Why I am leaving: 

• Facebook is bad for the world - 
  They've plainly declared war on privacy, they lock users in, and they're trying to take over every aspect of our online lives (and dumb it down).
  http://gizmodo.com/5530178​/top-ten-reasons-you-shoul​d-quit-facebook
• Facebook is homogeneous and unilateral - 
  What we use to communicate shapes us. As more and more stuff goes on Facebook, the more everything we do online has to conform to Facebook's platform. It's not adding to our online presence; it's sucking it up. 
• Facebook is annoying - 
  The groups, the apps, the "likes", the marketing and advertising, the constant stream of immutable noise.

Will i ever come back?

My requirements for an acceptable social networking tool are simple. It must be free software (also known as "open source"), and should be federated (think about email: you don't need a Gmail account to send mail to a Gmail account, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail users can email each other, etc). Since Facebook will likely never meet those simple requirements, I will likely never come back. 

If you want to leave too:

Read about how to delete your account, get the word out, and export your information here:
http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2011/07/delete-your-facebook-for-your-birthday.html

Invite all your friends to the event by using this Chromium/Google Chrome extension which adds a "select all" option to the invite window of Facebook events:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/npnaoebelpbmmcdoboinnphhoakdnaah

Then, if you want to increase your chances of people actually reading the event, click the "Message Guests" button and either paste in the same text, or write your own. 

Step 2: Shortly (a few days) before your birthday - Go to your Facebook privacy settings, select custom, and click the "Customize settings" link. On that page, under the "Things others share" section, uncheck the "Friends can post on my Wall" option. Then, go to your event page, hit the "Share" link to post it on your wall, and add a message like "For my birthday, I am leaving Facebook permanently". 

Step 3: On the day or the day after your birthday - Backup all of your account data then delete! Some tools for this are: 

• https://chrome.google.com/​webstore/detail/ficlccidpk​aiepnnboobcmafnnfoomga Chromium and Google Chrome extension that will copy all of your friends contact info and allow you to import them into Gmail.
• https://www.facebook.com/d​ownload/ Go to "Download Your Information" towards the bottom of your Facebook account settings. 
• http://facebookexport.com/ Get even more info. 
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/how-to-mass-export-all-of-your-facebook-friends-private-email-addresses/ Create a temporary Yahoo mail account that will allow you to import Facebook contacts. 

Then delete your account! The "Deactivate Account" option doesn't delete your account and Facebook will keep your data. To delete, use this link: http://www.facebook.com/he​lp/contact.php?show_form=d​elete_account

Now, you can bask in the freedom. 

The Free Game Lag

My article in the Free Software Foundation's Fall 2010 Bulletin, The Free Game Lag, was just posted online. In it, I explain why proponents of software freedom should not and need not dismiss gaming as a hopeless effort for free software. The version here includes a section on Blender's free game effort, which was not included in the FSF Bulletin due to space constraints, but you can read that version here. Printed copies of the Bulletin are sent out to FSF members twice a year. If you would like to support free software and the work of the FSF, you can learn more about membership and benefits here: http://www.fsf.org/associate/

There is one category of software that many see as being unsustainable as free software. Free video games have lagged behind other areas of free software, and the reasons behind this are fairly simple. 

Nexuiz

Still, even many free software proponents may fail to provide an answer to those who are skeptical about the viability of free gaming. While it is true that software should be ethical, video games need not suffer for it. The business models for production simply need to change, and just like they have for other software, they will for gaming as well. When people ask you how gaming as we know it can exist in a free software world, you should open with your response with, “It can't, but it can be better.”

There is a natural tendency for free software to take on more essential aspects of computing first. While subjective, it is clear that gaming is not a top-priority and, as such, has not advanced as rapidly as say, web browsers or word processors. That isn't to say that no progress has been made. Indeed, free gaming has certainly been catching up, but it will take a while to surpass the quality of proprietary games. This should not be surprising or alarming. We will get there in good time.

Ryzom

It's always funny to face the same arguments that have been presented to the free software movement and completely disproven in practice (e.g. Why would anybody produce free software?). The possible incentives for creating free games are as numerous as the motivations for producing other free software. Perhaps a graphics hardware company wants to fund the development of a game to show of the capabilities of their hardware. Perhaps a hospital wants to fund an enjoyable way for surgeons to improve their dexterity. Perhaps a school wants to fund a suite of educational games for students. Perhaps a competitive gaming league wants to fund their own game for tournaments. There are already a few notable examples of free games that are proving business models can be built around free games. 

Through a partnership with the Free Software Foundation, Winch Gate Properties Ltd released Ryzom, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, as free software under the AGPL, and its artwork as free cultural works under the CC-BY-SA license. As an online game, they fund development through subscriptions, so releasing as free software can only help them. 

Yo Fankie! 

Blender, the free software 3D media creation suite, organizes the production of films which are released as free cultural works and also organized the development of a free game based off of one of their films. These efforts help foster the development of Blender and showcase its abilities. They are able to successfully fund these efforts with DVD pre-orders and donations from people who support them. When you have a reputation for producing quality work, people will be willing to support you in making more. The game they produced, Yo Frankie!, may not be actively developed, but it does serve to prove that this model can be very successful. In less than one year and with a very small crew of people, they were able to make a fully functional game with impressive graphics. This is a testament to the viability of free gaming. 

The possibilities don't end there, and hopefully with these examples it becomes clearer how free gaming can advance with enough interest. Free gaming will never look like the world of proprietary games today. They won't use DRM to prevent you from sharing them, and they won't limit your freedom otherwise. We can look forward to games which are not crippled by antifeatures, and are able to build upon each other to develop faster than they would have otherwise. We should in fact take it as a great sign when critical questions that were once raised against free software as whole are now just pinned on one subset of software. Now, next time anyone asks, we should have a good answer for them. 

Interview with Libre Graphics Magazine at Libre Graphics Meeting 2011

I was recently able to attend the 2011 Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal, and there i had a blast meeting lots of people and founding out about so many great projects. One of these, is Libre Graphics Magazine and the fantastic people behind it: ginger "all lowercase" coons along with Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente of Manufactura Independente.

The magazine is all about free cultural works made with free software, as the entire magazine itself is and was (you can even see all of the revisions ever made to the magazine in their git repository)! I had the pleasure of interviewing them and video has been blogged over at Creative Commons labs. It's truly an outstanding project, but to find out more either see the blog post or watch the interview below!

View on YouTube or archive.org / ( CC BY-SA 3.0 | FAL 1.3 | GFDL 1.3 )

Reflections on the Students for Free Culture conference 2011 in NYC

I can't believe this was my first Students for Free Culture conference-- I've been missing out! Firstly, wow. Running a conference is a lot of work. The board deserves serious props for all the time and effort they put into making this event happen and be awesome! 

Learning about the long history of “Who let the dogs out?” was wildly entertaining, and listening to the fashion panel discuss how the industry is able to thrive thanks to a lack of copyright restrictions (as introduced by the TED Talk) was insightful. It was great being able to closely inspect a single work, revealing how every creative piece has a story, that everything is a remix, and also to be able to zoom way out and see how there are thriving industries that would not be possible with Intellectual Property restrictions. Seeing other industries unrestricted by IP that we take for granted would be useful in contrasting and comparing to those that are, and painting analogies that will help unfamiliar folks understand what we stand for. The ideals of the free culture movement are reflected through so many aspects of everyday life, and this was a great reminder of that. 

I saw lots of friends and made many more. Everyone, from all different backgrounds and political persuasions, clearly wanted to do everything in their power build a freer culture, a freer society. The people at this event filled me with hope, something I am always struggling to sustain. I'll be sure to carry this on to the Free Software Foundation's similarly-themed LibrePlanet conference, which is specific to free software. 

I was especially glad that web services were a major focus, as the Diaspora team gave a keynote presentation. Non-free, centralized, “walled-garden” web services like Facebook are an especially problematic and challenging issue, and it's great to see people interested in the up and coming alternatives. It was slightly frustrating, though, when the question and answer session became a ranting session for audience members who demanded that the Diaspora team use their New-York-Times-acquired fame to spread some loosely-defined ideals of “open source” to everything imaginable. As someone entirely committed to software freedom, I sympathize with anyone who wishes we had louder voices on our side. I am even lovingly critical of the Diaspora project, as I support them entirely, but also fear for their success and regret that other projects like GNU social don't receive anything near the same amount of attention. As they said in their attempt to respond, they use MacBooks, they don't use Gitorious, they are pragmatists before idealists and probably not the best people in the room to talk to about making everything free. Still, I would not use their Q&A time to tell them to be the megaphone for my ideals. I can only be thankful for the work they are doing. It was still a great keynote, and the conference would not have been complete without the remix panel and education panel, two essential parts of today's free culture movement. 

The unconference was a blast! It was almost an entire day run by the attendees! The breakout rooms talked about everything from gender issues in the free culture community to FreedomBox and the importance of free network services. It was great to learn about cool projects like LibreProjects.net which lists free software web services like BeWelcome, an alternative to CouchSurfing, and lots more. For almost everyone, it was their first time hearing about free web services like Diaspora and StatusNet/Identi.ca, so I hope that many SFC followers begin migrating from Facebook and Twitter and resolve to delete their accounts there. I also gave a quick lightning rant on how free culture supporters should pay closer attention to licenses and talk about free ones instead of Creative Commons ones, as there are not only licenses for free cultural works that are not Creative Commons like the GNU Free Documentation License and Free Art License, but also Creative Commons licenses that are not for free cultural works, like those with the NoDerivs or NonCommercial clauses. I don't think it went too bad for my first public speaking experience! 

The entire conference covered lots of reasons why free culture rocks, but next time, I would love to see more dedicated discussion on action and organizing. I've certainly strengthened my commitment to boycott Facebook, and been inspired and motivated to start my own project which will someday be ready at www.freeingculture.org (or check the wiki in the meantime). A dedicated space for people to share their own or their favorite free software and free culture projects would also be great, whether it's a physical space at the conference or a space online. The lightning talks didn't seem to be enough to cover projects in addition to the other interesting opinions, facts, and stories people shared. Also for next time, the more the merrier. Let's make these conferences huge-- tell everyone about the next one when it rolls around! 

As a strong free software / free culture activist, I've long been concerned with bringing these movements into the public eye, and it was at this conference that I really saw it for the first time: we, as a society ever-adapting to our technology, are becoming aware of the implications of ownership and control on how we are able to express ourselves, speak freely, and communicate in a digital world. And what's more? We care profoundly. That's not something to be taken lightly. 

Benjamin "Mako" Hill to do a Reddit AMA video interview

Benjamin "Mako" Hill has agreed to do a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) video interview on his work for free software and free culture where he will answer the top ten questions on this post...in a 12 foot Igloo i built.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fnw13/free_software_leader_benjamin_mako_hill_has/

Mako works on issues of technology, intellectual property, and society and is a key person in the free software and free culture movements. He is a core-developer, active contributor, and founding member of the Ubuntu Project, and he continues to serve on the Community Council board that oversees all non-technical aspects of the project. For nearly a decade, he has also been an active member of the Debian GNU/Linux Project, which Ubuntu is based on.

Mako is an Associate Member and a member of the Free Software Foundation's Board of Directors. Reddit just became a corporate patron of the FSF, and you can support software freedom by becoming an Associate Member yourself. Together with Erik Moeller from the Wikimedia Foundation, Mako founded the Definition of Free Cultural Works based on the Free Software Definition. This definition is agreed upon and used by the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and Students for Free Culture.

Mako serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop Per Child project. Currently a researcher and PhD Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab, and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Mako looks at social scientific analyses of social structure in free software and free culture communities.

Another fun fact: Mako's apartment is where Reddit was founded, and there is spray paint on the roof to prove it. 

Ask him anything! 

Spread the word: 

• http://www.reddit.com/r/freeculture/duplicates/fo02p/benjamin_mako_hill_to_do_a_video_ama_for_reddit/
• http://identi.ca/notice/64806741

Beyond Diaspora: Another Facebook alternative has a head start

I just wrote a piece for Google Blogoscoped about Facebook and the problems with it, Diaspora and the obstacles it's created itself, and another effort that probably deserves some more attention. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Here are a couple of teasers. On Facebook's battle for complete control over our online lives:

In the mind of Facebook, locking in users by holding their data captive is equally legitimate to actually making them want to stay, and it means more power for them. The problem is very simple. They own every piece of information about you that either you or your friends knowingly or unknowingly submit to them. They control who can see every bit of it, and they control how you can access it. You can bet when you delete something, it isn’t actually gone, that when you set something to private, there’s nothing to keep it that way, that when you want to see anything on Facebook, you’ll have to do it the way Facebook wants.

...and this on a promising alternative:

There are many such projects, but thus far Diaspora seems to be the only one to garner widespread attention. The developers were able to achieve instant popularity and raise twenty times their initial goal of $10K because to most people, Diaspora is the only project working towards this goal. It’s main asset right now seems to be mindshare, but it’s uncertain how much promise it holds beyond that. With the recent release of their pre-alpha source code, it immediately became apparent just how many security holes and problems are blocking the project. It will take a lot of work to fix and will almost certainly be impossible to make their public release as planned. Still, that isn’t to say the project isn’t worth supporting. It absolutely is, but it is not the only one you should know about.

What if there was another effort underway to create a federated social network, but based on a project that has already successfully been incorporated into the business of a Fortune 500 company, implemented in multiple public instances with tens of thousands of users, received funding which totals at a cool $2.3 million, and most importantly, already works with federation?

Free culture projects need a ubiquitous funding system

The free culture movement, which is of a whole with the free software movement, has made a lot of great progress but is still struggling to prove itself to be economically viable in the mainstream. I might even go so far as to say that a lack of a better funding system is the single biggest thing holding back many existing and many more prospective free culture projects. Imagine if Add/Remove Applications and the Ubuntu Software Center prompted downloaders with a "Donate" button that enabled users to easily support projects. Imagine if last— ahem— libre.fm displayed the same button for artists. Imagine if the idea of giving in order to support the production of work you appreciate went from public appeal to the public's expectation.

Currently the Software Freedom Conservancy exists as a fiscal sponsor for free software projects which "provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions." In short, member projects get the protections of a corporate entity without actually having to form and maintain one.

By joining the Conservancy, member FOSS projects obtain the benefits of a formal legal structure while keeping themselves focused on software development. These benefits include, most notably, the ability to collect earmarked project donations and protection from personal liability for the developers of the project. Another benefit of joining the Conservancy is that projects can use it to hold assets, which are managed by the Conservancy on behalf of and at the direction of the project. The Conservancy is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so member projects can receive tax-deductible donations to the extent allowed by law. 

The grander vision that is needed for free culture would require the infrastructure to scale plus provide more features. The primary motivation for this system would be more broad: to support free culture by providing free financial and administrative services to projects. This pay-what-you-want app store of sorts would differ from what the Software Freedom Conservancy offers in two ways.


Firstly, it would not be exclusive to software, but any free cultural works. It might even make sense to welcome non free culture projects to join, but perhaps only provide full benefits to verified free culture projects. For example, donations to non free culture projects may not be tax deductible, and/or a 10% fee on donations could apply to donations towards unverified projects while verified and approved free culture projects receive the full benefits of the program for free. Then again, an approval system might be hard to scale, and this being a funding system project, it could of course be used to fund itself.

Secondly, and this is the ambitious part, the platform would need to make the process streamlined so that any project could join. It should be developed as a free and, if possible, federated service. This service should allow projects to collect donations through a variety of means. Projects should be able to display buttons or widgets on their own website, and it should be possible, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, for desktop applications like Add/Remove Applications and the Ubuntu Software Center to display "donate" buttons. Beyond basic one-time donation functionality, support could also be added for fundraising campaigns with a set goal (think Kickstarter) and repeating contributions for subscriptions.

If such a system were in place which provided programmers, writers, and artists a platform to easily accept donations directly from their followers, free culture projects will be able to expand and prove viable on a much, much larger scale. So, who do you think has the resources for such a project? Which organizations would be interested in contributing? We need this yesterday, so let's get started.

In related news, the reason i was compelled to finally write up this post, is because i recently received my first donation to this blog! It was a nice token of appreciation from Ketil Nordstad, so thank you and thanks to any future donors i may have. I added the Google Checkout widget without displaying it prominently just as an experiment to see if anything would happen. Now that something has happened and i am more determined to prove that people will want to contribute to works they appreciate, i am taking the idea more seriously. I have added Paypal buttons as well, one of which enables subscriptions (repeated donations), but sadly doens't support pay-what-you-want. There are also Flattr buttons on all of my posts, but i can't throw 100% support behind it because it's a non-free service. Still it's very useful, and i'm happy to see someone trying to shake up the market. I have three free Flattr invitation codes for whoever wants them, but be aware that you can't use it unless you put at least €2 ($2.46) in your account each month which will be distributed evenly to the things you "flattr". Please do not use these invites unless you are ready to spend money!

Three free Flattr invites:

• 36c9206e7cfba696b
• b9775863e193437a8
• 824ce1901ba161593