On 2/28/07, Dana Powers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What other ways can we support the commons and explore options for free > > culture.
> If you are asking whether I could have better spent my time doing > other projects besides TOT, well maybe. I suspect I could have done > lots of things. Maybe CC would have hired someone else to do it. But > they didn't have to pay me much, and I learned quite a bit. I doubt I > would have done something that you would have cared much about had I > not. At the very least I'm glad TOT has begun to peek ever so slowly > into the thoughts of non-lawyers. Why does this always come down to name calling. It is not about sissies. It is not about me not caring about CC and its potential and actual function. Commons and free culture are important concepts and words at this point in time not just for me but for all of us. As far as I can see it is about parallax between the names and ideas which groups use to attract communities and funds, and then the organisational structures and functional practices which they actually engage in. I am probably clumsy about my understanding of 304c and 304d I feel I am not clumsy about my care to use the word commons in contexts where it means people can participate, and to think about free culture as an idea which is important to foster and engineer for regardless of the current state of play of law which does not care much about either concept. If these two organisations choose to use a 501 model of attracting funds but then find themselves unable to look outside of existing law or to experiment with ways to engineer and campaign for commons and free culture then that is a great shame. I have been interested in creating and authoring in a way which generates value but does not achieve value through restricting access. I have been working on a card game and matrix to help show people about these ideas. I have come to both groups looking for discussions and ideas which are about generating value while honoring commons and free culture and am disappointed to find that the letter of the existing copyright law is the primary beacon and is more scrupulously attended than the ideas of commons or free culture which are more loosely handled. These two groups hold valuable conceptual positions. This is because the copyright law is not supportive of commons and free culture. The community recognises and supports the value of these concepts which start from a different perspective than that which generates copyright law. There is value in sharing and participation; it is enabling. Copyright is about generating value through control, commons and free culture are about generating value from participation and collaboration. The value of commons and free culture as a position and organisation is directly related to people's ability to connect the concept with actions which support the core idea. If the groups use existing law as the guiding light in preference to supporting the commons or free culture where those choices arise, then there is much which is not being discussed, tried, tested. If all the ideas generated by these groups look only at value via restriction of access then the momentum of people's interest in commons and free culture cannot even work towards new models. My question is not about caring about one person's choice pf project which will certainly be something which will be worth knowing inside out in a few years, it is about thinking beyond the model which is generating a lack of participation and access, and looking to develop case studies and discussions around ways that people use commons to generate value, and use free culture as the first principle on which to build. Start with a small project, anything, that looks at ways people generate value in a shared context perhaps do practical experiments with a range of models or survey the groups that use those models already to see how value is generated and sharing is implemented. Populate the websites and wikis with people's exploration of a2k based economics. If that is out of scope for Creative Commons and Free Culture groups, then fine, my question was and is how can we look at other models. Which groups are having a go. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
