Free Culture

Lately the international student movement, Free Culture, has been receiving some well-deserved attention, in Wired Magazine among other places. This is a group that successfully sued Diebold Election Systems after the company misused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to threaten Swarthmore students who posted copies and links to some 13,000 internal Diebold memos. On the Free Culture blog Nelson Pavlosky writes:

It’s about free speech and the ability to express yourself, not passive complaining about the homogenization of corporate media. That’s what makes us different from some other groups that oppose media consolidation. We don’t just want to break up the oligopolies, we want to create the technology and culture necessary for everyone to become an active participant, we want to be free to collaborate on and interact with and comment upon and remix the media around us. We want everyone to have their own digital printing press so that they can make their voices heard, and to give everyone the tools to make professional-quality creations even if they are amateurs. Whining about the stupidity of mainstream media is not what we’re about. We’re vaguely annoyed when the people are referred to as “consumers” rather than citizens, and the implication that what we are fighting for is the right to consume as we like, rather than the ability to be active participants in a democratic society.

Well worth a look.