I was born in 1984, the same year as the free software movement, the year RMS left MIT to start the GNU project. Stallman refers to the free software movement as his child, and I’ve sometimes wondered, “What would the free software movement be like, if it were a kid? Would they be fun to hang out with? I bet they would be an idealist like their father, and, well, kind of like me.” In 1984, the internet, which would help make free software more than an idealistic dream, was itself just a babe. The number of hosts on the internet was just breaking one thousand… I don’t think anyone even knows how many hosts there are on the internet today. 1984 was also the year that the Supreme Court decided in Sony v. Universal, the “Betamax case,” that taping shows off your TV in order to watch them later was a fair use, not copyright infringement, and that the VCR manufacturer could not be held liable for the infringing activities of its users so long as the VCR had “substantial non-infringing uses.” The battle over what exactly the Betamax ruling meant has continued up until the present day, surviving the disappointingly unclear Grokster decision this summer, but that decision in the year of my birth was a significant victory for free culture, even though none of the parties that were “on our side” would have recognized themselves as part of a fledgling movement.

Shortly after I was born, my family became “early adopters” of the personal computer. Our first computer was an Altos computer with a 40 MB Winchester hard drive, it cost $18,000 and it was the state of the art! (I now carry 512 MB on my USB keychain drive, which cost 50 bucks.) My father wrote it off as a business expense for his home office, and as soon as I was old enough to sit up, he had me playing “educational” games on the green monochrome screen. As I got older I began to use word processors like Wordstar, where I learned the revolutionary concepts of “copy” and “paste,” and how digital technology allows you to edit a document, dissecting it into its component parts and reassembling it, without destroying the original. I loved this freedom to experiment with different versions of the same document, mashing together different drafts and building a better version from the mistakes of the past. I didn’t know this at the time, but later the internet would allow me to do this collaboratively on a global scale.

Blogging arrived on the scene as I arrived in high school, with the term “weblog” arriving in 1997 and “blog” being coined in 1998. Naturally, at the time I did not know that I would eventually have my own blog, or that I would meet my girlfriend through Livejournal. (Lauren dear, would this be too public of a place to “officially” ask you out?)

Presumably “bloggers” were covering the story as Napster debuted in 1999, and I joined millions of others in using it to expand my musical horizons. Before Napster, I mostly listened to my favorite band, Queen, and whatever my parents listened to or what came on the radio. After Napster, I became a fan of genres that many people have never heard of, such as progressive rock, trance, and third wave ska, and this led me to purchase many CDs I would, otherwise, have never have purchased. (This had an impact on my own musical compositions, as my noodling around on the guitar began to produce full-fledged songs around that time.) Some of my favorite finds on Napster were purely accidental, songs that turned up in the search results while I was looking for other things. For instance, I was searching for the Matrix soundtrack, and found a trance song labeled “Matrix ][“, which I later discovered was actually “Grid ][” by the Cynic Project, who apparently was just a college kid making music in his basement. The Cynic Project album, “Soundscape Sampler,” was available from MP3.com at the time, and MP3.com did on-demand printing of CDs for their artists, so I bought the CD.

That CD is now a historical artifact, of course, since MP3.com was killed off shortly after I purchased that album. I watched as both Napster and MP3.com were destroyed by record industry lawsuits, and I became angry and resentful. At the time, I didn’t know the history of the persecution of new technologies by the industries of old, but I did know that these services created a marketplace for more obscure talent who did not have other means to access the listening public. Perhaps more importantly, they helped lead to a more educated listening public, as any decent library should. Both of those services were important to my development as a person and a music fan, and both of them were pioneering services that enabled independent artists to reach the public without having to sell their souls to a record label. I didn’t understand why there hadn’t been more of a public effort to defend these communities, and I was disappointed that I hadn’t gotten a chance to fight for the revolutionary potential that they offered. Argue as much as you like about the ethics of filesharing, it’s a complex issue that cannot be boiled down to a simple “right” or “wrong.” Peer-to-peer is bigger than filesharing anyway, and while Napster awakened me to the power of the internet to circumvent existing avenues of distribution (and control), the internet is not a one-trick pony. Writing off the power of the internet to change the world, and the power of the people who grew up with it, would be a grave error.

Any history buff could tell you that in 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamplet which inspired the colonists to continue with their revolutionary fight against the British. Any geek or Super Bowl fan could tell you that in 1984 – the year I was born – the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, helping to start the computer revolution. The free culture movement is a different type of revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. Free culture is, after all, like print culture squared; it represents a shift from one-way broadcasting to two-way communication. And leading the fight for a participatory culture is just Common Sense.

This leads to an interesting question: when we speak of taking the free culture movement off the internet and into the streets, how can we avoid looking silly? There are certainly aspects of free culture where lives are at stake: for instance, millions of people suffer and die in the third world because we’re too stupid to use generic drugs to help them, instead of sending inadequate quantities of expensive licensed drugs. But what do we do when lives do not hang in the balance? Will people write us off as nutjobs for protesting in favor of iPods? Would they be right to do so? It seems harder to go over the edge when doing online activism, especially since internet communities can be threatened or destroyed by copyright and free speech issues, so it makes sense to carry on activism in those threatened communities. But in the physical world, our physical bodies are generally not at stake. Only when our copyright laws go completely over the edge and people get thrown in jail do protests seem justified. But do we want to wait until things get that bad? Isn’t some pre-emptive protesting in order?

How can we show that these issues are important to us, and take action in “meatspace,” without people thinking that we are overreacting?

Everyone at FreeCulture.org (FC.o) wanted to be a guest blogger for Larry, of course. While we managed to select five of our best bloggers to represent the organization, this is still the largest number of people who have blogged for Lessig at once. Therefore, we’ve decided to stick to several common themes, in order to provide some continuity.

As I explained in a recent interview, FreeCulture.org was created to fill several gaps in the free culture movement, and we are unique in three ways:
(1) We are a student/youth organization, in a field where the youth have been conspicuous by their absence.
(2) We have a strong local, physical presence, while remaining distributed over a large geographical area. We have local chapters popping up at campuses across the United States, and soon around the world.
(3) We are a big tent organization, uniting many demographics and interest groups into a coherent movement.

These are all aspects in which the free culture movement has been deficient in the past, and I would like to take this week to explore how we can address these shortcomings in the future. How can we get the youth involved? How can we take free culture off the internet and into the streets? How can we take free culture mainstream, and make the movement relevant to people who may not be computer geeks or copyright nerds? Together, I trust that we can find some answers to these questions.