Monthly Archives: September 2008

Ben Jones has a piece about my book, Free Culture, being made available on Kindle, a platform that uses DRM.
In my view, the “free culture” test for a work is whether it is available freely — not whether it is also available not freely. “Free Culture” is available freely — meaning, it is licensed freely here. One can put that freely licensed version on a Kindle, freely. I hadn’t known my publisher was going to make Free Culture available on the Kindle, but now that they have, I’d be very keen to have a version I can make freely available on the “Free Culture” remix page.
“But shouldn’t,” one could well argue, “you not support DRM technologies at all?” That’s a valid position taken by many I respect. My view, however, is that one supports the campaign to avoid debilitating DRM by making culture freely available. New technologies will try all sorts of new deals to make things competitive. So long as free, open format versions are available to compete with that, I am not concerned about the DRM’d version existing as well.
Ben’s post claims that one would violate “the DMCA by circumventing the DRM, it is hard to put the pdf version of the book on the Kindle.” I don’t get this. There’s no violating of the DMCA when one adapts the format of a work as permitted by the copyright holder. Indeed, I should think the DMCA is violated by any effort to restrict the rights granted by a license — including the CC license rights. So any problem here is not the user’s — it is Kindle’s.
Anyway, I may be wrong about this. And I’ll be listening to see. Continue reading →

From Students for Free Culture:

Free Culture 2008 Conference
October 11-12, 2008
Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley CA
http://conference.freeculture.org
What’s Free Culture?
Free Culture is a movement focused on creativity and innovation, communication and free expression, public access to knowledge and civil liberties. Students for Free Culture at Berkeley is proudly hosting the Free Culture 2008 Conference over Columbus Day weekend.
Conference Details
The conference will be held October 11th at the Chevron Auditorium at UC Berkeley. Anyone interested in politics, tech policy, art, and culture will find something to like—we’ll be featuring keynote presentations from Pam Samuelson of Boalt Hall, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law, and Mozilla Corporation CEO John Lilly. We are also convening panels on transparent politics, remix culture, copyright reform, and open access to knowledge and medicine. Richard Rinehart of Berkeley Art Museum will present the groundbreaking OpenMuseum project and Berkeley’s OKAPI group will demonstrate its virtual recreation of Çatalhöyük island for the Open Archaeology project. Filmmaker Nina Paley will be present for a screening of her groundbreaking film Sita Sings the Blues. And on October 12th, SFC will present a slate of intimate “unconference” style workshops on the Berkeley campus. Join guests from Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others!
We’re asking attendees to donate what they think the conference is worth, whether that’s $1 or $100. Register today at http://conference.freeculture.org/register/!

As advertised, I’m speaking. I’ll introduce my new book, Remix, which will be released that week. (And fear not, there’s a very cool Creative Commons surprise to be announced then (iow: please don’t sweat copyright pages)). Continue reading →