Frankly, I don't see the point of the local group without any form of political organisation as IP law will continue to develop and change without paying any attention to these free-wheeling local groups. Indeed the Networkers will eventually be undermined by IP law changes as they have no effective national voice to champion their needs, and bluntly, no-one cares about local arts groups full of school children and pensioners drawing pictures of trees that they share with each other. I suggest you all read your history books and absorb the important fact that political change only occurs through solidarity and effective political mobilisation, and never through the actions of individuals dispersed across the nation/network (contra Benkler and his overly optimistic book). In other words, they've got the contacts, the money, the power, the lobbyists, the PR companies, the jobs, the exports, the copyrights, the statistics and the friends in high places. We've got a bunch of people armed with felt-tip pens, badly drawn watercolours, broadband internet connections and an out-of-date wiki-based website... oh, yeah, and a mailing list full of people that never speak.. I would like to suggest a Free Culture Political caucus that signs off from this pointless mailing list and moves to another one where the following are its founding aims: (1) Set up a member-based national protest organisation (2) Encourage members to join existing political parties and lobby for Free Culture issues inside them. (3) Start organising research projects, helping people to find PhD/MA funding for Free Culture based research (i.e. help each other write research proposals). (4) Seek backing from grants, personal contributions and so on (5) Meet bi-monthly in London with agendas, minutes and project plans that are targeted to further Free Culture. (6) Set up press liason and start building a database of Free Culture news and articles that can be sent to enquiring journalists etc. (7) Elect a national chair and a board and give the organisation some direction. (8) Get these people to conferences (TUC anyone?) and start getting the message out beyond the narrow confines of this pitiful mailing list. (9) Get speakers over (by getting the funding in place) like Lessig at Universities etc... No more Wales-eque platitudes about neutral political aims, no more naive wikipedian NPOV (that disguises some pretty weird prejudices), no more hippy community groups that can hold hands to make Parliament levitate and copyright law change through the power of the felt-tip pen. Lets have more politics, more realism and more hard slog getting that political campaign out into the centre of the political imaginary and beyond the narrow concerns of culture. Remember public institutions? Remember the concept of the public good/common good? Remember the professionalism and ethical responsibility of those in the public sector? These are all things that are liked to the concept of the 'common-wealth' and the common good. These are things we can attach our message to and which can help raise the quality and depth of our arguments. Most importantly we should be aligning our argument with the concept of the public sphere, and the threat to that democratic voice by the spectre of copyright and property rights in ideas and concepts.. We need only look back at the archives of this mailing list to see how little we have achieved by acting alone in our own self-founded little Islands. No-one cares because the arguments don't work at a local level - no-one really cares about the charcoal etching of a local river being copied by someone else. Nor do they care about putting copyright signs on their badly written poetry or local newsletter. The proper focus of copyrighted culture is at the level of the nation, where we are talking about global brands, best-selling authors, and block-buster films. We need to be addressing the discontinuity between the fact that most people don't realise that it is illegal to copy your CD to your iPod, that you *can't* make copies of your friends movie collection nor can you put your favourite record on your wedding video. This is where the national/global interfaces with the local and immediate, where the public impinges on the private and where we can get people to ask questions about how they want to use and re-use culture. And that is the start of an effective political strategy to ratchet back copyright and other intellectual property rights... On 12 Sep 2006, at 13:27, Tim Cowlishaw wrote:
---- David M. Berry EDB128 Media and Film Department University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9RH 01273 606755 x4837 |
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