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'''= There is a need, recognized for several worldwide voices, of an international space to build and coordinate a global frame and common agenda for the free culture and knowledge issues; the Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such space''' | '''= There is a need, recognized for several worldwide voices, of an international space to build and coordinate a global frame and common agenda for the free culture and knowledge issues; the Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such space''' | ||
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=History= | |||
==The prehistory: Emergence of the [[Free Culture Movement]]== | |||
Felix Stalder: | |||
"The practice of free culture – sharing, reuse and cooperative production – has always existed in computer networks, long before there was a proper name for it. In the early days, these practices were an extension of the cooperative culture of computer programming. The first multi-player games emerged in the late 1970s and a few years later several of them were accessible over the Internet. Quickly, they became very popular among the then still relatively small group of people who has access to the Internet. Generally, these were open-ended, text-based environments where users would create their own spaces and interact with each other. While there existed a certain sense of ownership over the spaces created individually, there was also a sense of a shared responsibility for the environment as a whole.1 Starting in the early 1990s, artists not directly connected to culture of computer science or hacking began to experiment with the possibilities of the Internet and the potential to create different sets of relationships among artists and the public, based on ideas of interactivity and/or community. Among the pioneering projects was the artist-run network node The Thing, founded in 1991 in New York and quickly gaining nodes across Europe. For much of the decade, the high-tech character of these projects provided both sense of a shared experience and a significant hurdle of much of the cultural world to understand or even participate in these endeavors.Many of the main questions of what is now Free Culture – the relationship between artist and audience, reuse and copyright, economies of sharing, critique of dominant cultural institutions – were beginning to be articulated. | |||
At the turn of the century affordable computers had become powerful enough to support a broad range of (semi)professional cultural production, significantly lowering the barriers to many aspects of making culture. Moreover, the Internet had spread widely throughout society (although unevenly in respect to region and class). Core sectors of the economy at large were changing from the logic of mass production to an ‘informational paradigm’ which demands communicative and creative skills from its workforce and vastly expands the field of cultural production (in the creative industries). Thus more people than ever before had the skills and the means to produce and distribute their own cultural works. | |||
Cultural production at large was being affected by cheap mass (self-)communication, easy conversion between media and decentralized distribution. First, remixing – using existing works to create new ones – has become central to cultural production. Second, subcultures of small or non-commercial cultural producers, long excluded by the efficient distribution mechanisms of the cultural industries, found themselves on the same technological footing with established players and able to connect to audiences of any size. This helped them to increase and improve their cultural output. Third, many of the actions that copyright law granted exclusively to rights-holders – making and distributing exact copies or transformed works – were now being done by masses of people without authorization, not in the privacy of their homes but online (that is, in public). Much of what constituted the new digital mass culture was a violation of copyright law and rights owners – fearing loss of control over cultural works which they regard as their exclusive property – organized to reassert that control. In a series of international agreements (most importantly, the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, 1996) and national legislations (for example, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998 and the EU Copyright Directive, 2001) the rights of owners were strengthened. At the same time, litigation against copyright infringement escalated. | |||
The tension between the enforcement of increasingly restrictive laws and the growing popularity of permissive cultural practices rose to the surface and spilled into the mainstream. In part as a response to the aggressiveness of the cultural industries, in part drawing inspiration from the Free Software movement, large numbers of users and producers recognized the need to defend their culture. Their goal has been to protect and advance the freedoms that had defined digital culture from the beginning. In a series of influential books, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor and a leading figure of the Free Culture movement, argued that recent changes in law and technology could easily restrict freedoms and create what he called a permission culture. This would allow owners of past cultural works to grant or withhold permission, at their discretion, to those seeking to create the culture of the present. The effect would be a vast increase in the control exercised by a few over the many, implemented through Digital Right Management (DRM) technologies and ubiquitous surveillance of social communication. This would cripple the potential for the emergence of a read/write culture in which the ability to consume cultural works (read) would be matched by that to produce them (write). For such a culture to flourish, he argued, people need to be able – technically, legally, and socially – to build on and transform the culture in which they live | |||
The Free Culture movement began to take shape. One focus was to develop tools allowing copyright law, as it exists, to support rather than restrict the sharing and transformation of cultural works. Following the lead of Free Software, a series of licenses was developed to enable creators to make their works available freely. Among the first were the Open Content License (1998) and the Free Art License (2000), both based closely on the GNU GPL license. In 2001, Creative Commons (CC) established itself as one of the central hubs of Free Culture, by offering easy-to-use, customizable licenses granting some rights to the public. Works published under a Creative Commons license are always freely usable for non-commercial purposes. Some versions of the license also allow free transformation of the works and others allow commercial use. A combination of good timing, user-friendly implementation and significant support from leading American universities made CC licenses the de facto standard legal foundation of free culture, despite criticism and weaknesses. By mid 2009, it was estimated that some 250 million works had been published under one or other of the CC licenses. This mass adoption of CC licenses shows the breadth of the Free Culture movement. | |||
It took slightly less than a decade to establish Creative Commons as the de-facto legal standard of Free Culture. During the same period, it became increasingly understood at the legal dimension constitutes only one of many transformations connected to free culture. These other dimensions are now becoming increasingly to the foreground." | |||
(draft of the essay for Kosmos Journal, 2011) | |||
==Establishing the Need and a Program for a FC Forum== | |||
Felix Stalder: | |||
"The starting point for the discussion at the Free Culture Forum was a recognition that “in order to develop and grow, the human capacity for creativity requires access to existing culture, knowledge and information. Everyone can contribute to the production of culture, values and wealth on different scales, ranging from very basic to very complex creative contributions. The resources and time required for creative activities also vary in scale. We want to promote ways of liberating this time and these resources so that the distributed potential can be deployed in a sustainable way.”1 Form this recognition, two points can be made. First, it makes no sense to establish strict and hard dividing lines between creators and audiences, because even exceptional artists are embedded in larger social environments that produce much of the innovation that these artists then articulate and digital technology allows to perform small creative productions on top of very large ones (think of editing a blockbuster movie on a home computer and putting the resulting clip up on youtube.). Second, while recognizing the important of highly distributed and modular acts of cultural production, there are also cultural products that require long-sustained individual and collective efforts to be produced. For Free Culture to be sustainable, it needs to be develop frameworks in the full range of creative scales – the very small and the very large and everything in between – can flourish. Its unsustainable to limit free culture to the non-professional (“user generated”) aspects of culture without finding ways of liberating also professional culture. In terms of the small acts, which are part of human nature, the main issues are about removing barriers, in terms of copyright restrictions, lack of technical and cultural skills, but also discriminatory exclusions from public discourse. In terms of developing a professional free culture, one of the main task is to find new economic models that can sustain artists without taking away the freedom of the audiences/users. This is not an impossible task as the free software movement has shown, but it has also shown that it requires significant institutional innovations, which in the field of culture need to be very different from those successfully developed in the field of software. | |||
'''Of the ten economic models listed in the Declaration and elaborated in the accompanying How-To for Sustainable Creativity, I want to highlight three.''' | |||
'''First, “crowd-funding.''' Enabling individual citizens or entities to contribute to a cultural enterprise by becoming stakeholders. This contribution can take the form of an investment before the work has been created, or via micro or macro credits or donations towards existing works.” Today, there are dozens of infrastructures that enable anyone to begin to raise funding through small (and, of course, large) donations from people interested in seeing a project being realized. Among the most successful platforms is kickstarter.com. On this platform, creators can publish their projects plans, including the amount of money they need to do it, and people who like to see this realized can pledge money towards it. If the entire sum is being pledged within the announced time-frame, the money is released to the project. As Kickstarter explains, their approach is closest to patronage, since it “is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.”4 While kickstarter does not require projects to be realized under a free license and is not directly promoting free culture, it helps to solve one of the crucial chlallenges of free culture. Even if copies can be made and distributed for free, the first copy still needs to be financed. While the classic approach of the cultural industries has been to finance the first copy as investment which generates incomes through the control all subsequent copies, crowd-funding allows to raise money up front. Not as investment, but as kind of community contribution towards something that enough people want to see existing, just for the pleasure its existence and not for any monetary payback. It's kind of a non-capitalist venture financing which requires to build communities from the start, rather than working cloistered and then releasing the finished work into the world. While creating communities is not easy and on kickstarter as everywhere else, many more project are ignored than appreciated, it is a system that allows also for small but devoted niches to be sustainable. | |||
'''Second, “commons-based strategies and distributed value creation.''' The providers of commercial platforms for cooperation share their revenues with the creators who produce the material that makes their services valuable, while commoners are able to freely share and exploit the commons.” The idea behind is that there need to be a revenue sharing between the providers of the platform which enables the users on the one hand, and the users who create content and thus make platform interesting and valuable, on the other hand. One of the working models here is YouTube, which has a program to split revenue generated by the platform 50:50 with creators who provide the content. While this has been created primarily to appease major copyright holders, it allows also other creators to generate income. In theory, this represent a balanced recognition that both the platform and the content creator generate value that is monetized in this commercial environment. In practice, however, it instigates a popularity contest replicating the advertisement driven model of television. The popularity contest works on two level. First, in order to make money, one needs to create content that can be associated with ad terms that are popular and thus expensive (their price is determined by Google's very flexible bidding system) and one needs to create content that is popular with the viewers. While hard numbers cannot be provided due to Google's confidentiality agreements, it appears that the amount shared with the users is about $ 0.75-2.50 / 1000 views of a video (and the associated clicks on the add-messages). Thus, this is only a suitable models for a very particular type of cultural works. But for these, it can work.5 | |||
'''Third, “collective financing systems.''' A flat-rate on internet connections can be consider only if it implies an equitable and democratic resource- pooling system and recognizes citizens rights to share and re-use works freely.” While such a system – a culture flat rate – does not (yet) exist, it is being promoted by parts of the content industry. Within the free culture movement, it is highly contentious, in part because there are many different variations of the flat rate and none of them is worked out in all details or tested under real-life conditions. The industry proposal is to allow file-sharing while measuring downloads and then dividing the sum raised through the flat rate by the number of downloads.6 Within the Free Culture movement, some see this as an acceptable compromise to end the “war on sharing” and avoid the imposition of ever stricter copyright enforcement laws (such as the “three-strikes-and-you-are-out” rules adopted in France under the name of Hadopi).* Most others, however, see substantial difficulties because of the experience with existing collecting societies, because of the built-in bias towards the already popular, and because of the lack of any provisions to allow reuse of works. In the strict form favored by the industry, the flat would extend the producer consumer divide, which is widely seen as antithetical to Free Culture. There are, however, also proposals for a flat rate as a general funding mechanism for digital culture that could supplement other financing mechanisms without the need to measure all downloads and the associated bias towards the popular.7 The latter proposals, however, are still very theoretical and lack even the limited political support that the more strict version of the flat rate have. To avoid confusion between the two type of proposals, the Declaration adopts the term “collective financing system” and specifies numerous conditions under which a levy would be an acceptable form to make free culture sustainable. Thus, the critique elaborated at the FCForum of the flat rate proposals can be viewed as a left-wing critique focusing on social effects of the design and administration, rather than a right wing-critique of the legitimacy of creating a levy in the first place." | |||
(draft of the essay for Kosmos Journal, 2011) | |||
Revision as of 22:40, 7 May 2011
= There is a need, recognized for several worldwide voices, of an international space to build and coordinate a global frame and common agenda for the free culture and knowledge issues; the Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such space
URL = http://fcforum.net/ [1]
Description
1.
"The FCForum is an international arena to build and coordinate action for issues related to free/libre culture and access to knowledge.The FCForum brings together key organizations and active voices in the spheres of free/libre culture and knowledge, and provides a meeting pointto find answers to the pressing questions behind the current paradigm shift.
Facing the powerful lobbies of the copyright industries, the FCForum is a space of proposal’s construction from the civil society for strengthening the citizen’s opinion to face the debate of the creation and distribution of art, culture and knowledge on the digital era." (http://2010.fcforum.net/)
2.
From the Wikipedia [2]:
"The Free Culture Forum is an international encounter on free culture and knowledge that took place in Barcelona from October 30 to November 1st 2009. It took place jointly with the second edition of the Oxcars. During the Forum 200 organizations and individuals linked to free culture expressions discuss on the privatization of the creation and the intellectual property and its incidence in the access to the knowledge and the creation and distribution of the art, knowledge and culture. The Forum ended up with the definition of a "Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge". The main objectives of the Forum are, on the one hand, building networks to optimize the efforts of the different groups and setting common demands against the proposals from industry and governments in their eagerness to control culture and information; and on the other hand reinforcing the self-organization of tools and infrastructures to support free culture. Official observers from the European Community´s Commission for Culture and Education (Valerie Panis), the European Community´s Commission for Consumer Protection (Katrine Thomsen) and Government of Brazil (through its Department of Digital Culture) (José Murilo) were present. The Forum was organised by Exgae, Networked Politics and Free Knowledge Institute." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_forum)
Status
2009
"At last year’s FCForum we created the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge, a comprehensive legal compendium that has been adopted as a Charter by many organizations all around the world. The document covers over 20 years of legal proposals for adapting copyright legislation to the digital era, and was drafted by more than 100 specialists and major organizations from twenty different countries.
It has turn into a very effective tool for counteracting reactionary legal proposals from the content industries lobbies as ACTA, the Spanish Law for Sustainable Culture, among others." (http://2010.fcforum.net/)
2010
"The FCForum, which takes place in tandem with the 3rd oXcars Festival – the biggest free/libre culture event of all time ; ) –, is a three-day event of international scale in which to organize strategies that encompass different solutions and proposals from around the world, so that they add up and complement each other. It aims to build a shared response to the pressure exerted on governments by the lobbies of a sector of the industry.
On 2010, a key moment of this historical struggle, is crucial a discussion based in how to defend and generate new economic models emerged in the digital era.
This will be 2010 FCForum’s topic.
Before the debate is closed and the legislation only reflects of governments, industries and lobbies interests, it is essential that we provide answers on how free/libre culture can be sustainable." (http://2010.fcforum.net/)
History
The prehistory: Emergence of the Free Culture Movement
Felix Stalder:
"The practice of free culture – sharing, reuse and cooperative production – has always existed in computer networks, long before there was a proper name for it. In the early days, these practices were an extension of the cooperative culture of computer programming. The first multi-player games emerged in the late 1970s and a few years later several of them were accessible over the Internet. Quickly, they became very popular among the then still relatively small group of people who has access to the Internet. Generally, these were open-ended, text-based environments where users would create their own spaces and interact with each other. While there existed a certain sense of ownership over the spaces created individually, there was also a sense of a shared responsibility for the environment as a whole.1 Starting in the early 1990s, artists not directly connected to culture of computer science or hacking began to experiment with the possibilities of the Internet and the potential to create different sets of relationships among artists and the public, based on ideas of interactivity and/or community. Among the pioneering projects was the artist-run network node The Thing, founded in 1991 in New York and quickly gaining nodes across Europe. For much of the decade, the high-tech character of these projects provided both sense of a shared experience and a significant hurdle of much of the cultural world to understand or even participate in these endeavors.Many of the main questions of what is now Free Culture – the relationship between artist and audience, reuse and copyright, economies of sharing, critique of dominant cultural institutions – were beginning to be articulated.
At the turn of the century affordable computers had become powerful enough to support a broad range of (semi)professional cultural production, significantly lowering the barriers to many aspects of making culture. Moreover, the Internet had spread widely throughout society (although unevenly in respect to region and class). Core sectors of the economy at large were changing from the logic of mass production to an ‘informational paradigm’ which demands communicative and creative skills from its workforce and vastly expands the field of cultural production (in the creative industries). Thus more people than ever before had the skills and the means to produce and distribute their own cultural works.
Cultural production at large was being affected by cheap mass (self-)communication, easy conversion between media and decentralized distribution. First, remixing – using existing works to create new ones – has become central to cultural production. Second, subcultures of small or non-commercial cultural producers, long excluded by the efficient distribution mechanisms of the cultural industries, found themselves on the same technological footing with established players and able to connect to audiences of any size. This helped them to increase and improve their cultural output. Third, many of the actions that copyright law granted exclusively to rights-holders – making and distributing exact copies or transformed works – were now being done by masses of people without authorization, not in the privacy of their homes but online (that is, in public). Much of what constituted the new digital mass culture was a violation of copyright law and rights owners – fearing loss of control over cultural works which they regard as their exclusive property – organized to reassert that control. In a series of international agreements (most importantly, the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, 1996) and national legislations (for example, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998 and the EU Copyright Directive, 2001) the rights of owners were strengthened. At the same time, litigation against copyright infringement escalated.
The tension between the enforcement of increasingly restrictive laws and the growing popularity of permissive cultural practices rose to the surface and spilled into the mainstream. In part as a response to the aggressiveness of the cultural industries, in part drawing inspiration from the Free Software movement, large numbers of users and producers recognized the need to defend their culture. Their goal has been to protect and advance the freedoms that had defined digital culture from the beginning. In a series of influential books, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor and a leading figure of the Free Culture movement, argued that recent changes in law and technology could easily restrict freedoms and create what he called a permission culture. This would allow owners of past cultural works to grant or withhold permission, at their discretion, to those seeking to create the culture of the present. The effect would be a vast increase in the control exercised by a few over the many, implemented through Digital Right Management (DRM) technologies and ubiquitous surveillance of social communication. This would cripple the potential for the emergence of a read/write culture in which the ability to consume cultural works (read) would be matched by that to produce them (write). For such a culture to flourish, he argued, people need to be able – technically, legally, and socially – to build on and transform the culture in which they live
The Free Culture movement began to take shape. One focus was to develop tools allowing copyright law, as it exists, to support rather than restrict the sharing and transformation of cultural works. Following the lead of Free Software, a series of licenses was developed to enable creators to make their works available freely. Among the first were the Open Content License (1998) and the Free Art License (2000), both based closely on the GNU GPL license. In 2001, Creative Commons (CC) established itself as one of the central hubs of Free Culture, by offering easy-to-use, customizable licenses granting some rights to the public. Works published under a Creative Commons license are always freely usable for non-commercial purposes. Some versions of the license also allow free transformation of the works and others allow commercial use. A combination of good timing, user-friendly implementation and significant support from leading American universities made CC licenses the de facto standard legal foundation of free culture, despite criticism and weaknesses. By mid 2009, it was estimated that some 250 million works had been published under one or other of the CC licenses. This mass adoption of CC licenses shows the breadth of the Free Culture movement.
It took slightly less than a decade to establish Creative Commons as the de-facto legal standard of Free Culture. During the same period, it became increasingly understood at the legal dimension constitutes only one of many transformations connected to free culture. These other dimensions are now becoming increasingly to the foreground." (draft of the essay for Kosmos Journal, 2011)
Establishing the Need and a Program for a FC Forum
Felix Stalder:
"The starting point for the discussion at the Free Culture Forum was a recognition that “in order to develop and grow, the human capacity for creativity requires access to existing culture, knowledge and information. Everyone can contribute to the production of culture, values and wealth on different scales, ranging from very basic to very complex creative contributions. The resources and time required for creative activities also vary in scale. We want to promote ways of liberating this time and these resources so that the distributed potential can be deployed in a sustainable way.”1 Form this recognition, two points can be made. First, it makes no sense to establish strict and hard dividing lines between creators and audiences, because even exceptional artists are embedded in larger social environments that produce much of the innovation that these artists then articulate and digital technology allows to perform small creative productions on top of very large ones (think of editing a blockbuster movie on a home computer and putting the resulting clip up on youtube.). Second, while recognizing the important of highly distributed and modular acts of cultural production, there are also cultural products that require long-sustained individual and collective efforts to be produced. For Free Culture to be sustainable, it needs to be develop frameworks in the full range of creative scales – the very small and the very large and everything in between – can flourish. Its unsustainable to limit free culture to the non-professional (“user generated”) aspects of culture without finding ways of liberating also professional culture. In terms of the small acts, which are part of human nature, the main issues are about removing barriers, in terms of copyright restrictions, lack of technical and cultural skills, but also discriminatory exclusions from public discourse. In terms of developing a professional free culture, one of the main task is to find new economic models that can sustain artists without taking away the freedom of the audiences/users. This is not an impossible task as the free software movement has shown, but it has also shown that it requires significant institutional innovations, which in the field of culture need to be very different from those successfully developed in the field of software.
Of the ten economic models listed in the Declaration and elaborated in the accompanying How-To for Sustainable Creativity, I want to highlight three.
First, “crowd-funding. Enabling individual citizens or entities to contribute to a cultural enterprise by becoming stakeholders. This contribution can take the form of an investment before the work has been created, or via micro or macro credits or donations towards existing works.” Today, there are dozens of infrastructures that enable anyone to begin to raise funding through small (and, of course, large) donations from people interested in seeing a project being realized. Among the most successful platforms is kickstarter.com. On this platform, creators can publish their projects plans, including the amount of money they need to do it, and people who like to see this realized can pledge money towards it. If the entire sum is being pledged within the announced time-frame, the money is released to the project. As Kickstarter explains, their approach is closest to patronage, since it “is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.”4 While kickstarter does not require projects to be realized under a free license and is not directly promoting free culture, it helps to solve one of the crucial chlallenges of free culture. Even if copies can be made and distributed for free, the first copy still needs to be financed. While the classic approach of the cultural industries has been to finance the first copy as investment which generates incomes through the control all subsequent copies, crowd-funding allows to raise money up front. Not as investment, but as kind of community contribution towards something that enough people want to see existing, just for the pleasure its existence and not for any monetary payback. It's kind of a non-capitalist venture financing which requires to build communities from the start, rather than working cloistered and then releasing the finished work into the world. While creating communities is not easy and on kickstarter as everywhere else, many more project are ignored than appreciated, it is a system that allows also for small but devoted niches to be sustainable.
Second, “commons-based strategies and distributed value creation. The providers of commercial platforms for cooperation share their revenues with the creators who produce the material that makes their services valuable, while commoners are able to freely share and exploit the commons.” The idea behind is that there need to be a revenue sharing between the providers of the platform which enables the users on the one hand, and the users who create content and thus make platform interesting and valuable, on the other hand. One of the working models here is YouTube, which has a program to split revenue generated by the platform 50:50 with creators who provide the content. While this has been created primarily to appease major copyright holders, it allows also other creators to generate income. In theory, this represent a balanced recognition that both the platform and the content creator generate value that is monetized in this commercial environment. In practice, however, it instigates a popularity contest replicating the advertisement driven model of television. The popularity contest works on two level. First, in order to make money, one needs to create content that can be associated with ad terms that are popular and thus expensive (their price is determined by Google's very flexible bidding system) and one needs to create content that is popular with the viewers. While hard numbers cannot be provided due to Google's confidentiality agreements, it appears that the amount shared with the users is about $ 0.75-2.50 / 1000 views of a video (and the associated clicks on the add-messages). Thus, this is only a suitable models for a very particular type of cultural works. But for these, it can work.5
Third, “collective financing systems. A flat-rate on internet connections can be consider only if it implies an equitable and democratic resource- pooling system and recognizes citizens rights to share and re-use works freely.” While such a system – a culture flat rate – does not (yet) exist, it is being promoted by parts of the content industry. Within the free culture movement, it is highly contentious, in part because there are many different variations of the flat rate and none of them is worked out in all details or tested under real-life conditions. The industry proposal is to allow file-sharing while measuring downloads and then dividing the sum raised through the flat rate by the number of downloads.6 Within the Free Culture movement, some see this as an acceptable compromise to end the “war on sharing” and avoid the imposition of ever stricter copyright enforcement laws (such as the “three-strikes-and-you-are-out” rules adopted in France under the name of Hadopi).* Most others, however, see substantial difficulties because of the experience with existing collecting societies, because of the built-in bias towards the already popular, and because of the lack of any provisions to allow reuse of works. In the strict form favored by the industry, the flat would extend the producer consumer divide, which is widely seen as antithetical to Free Culture. There are, however, also proposals for a flat rate as a general funding mechanism for digital culture that could supplement other financing mechanisms without the need to measure all downloads and the associated bias towards the popular.7 The latter proposals, however, are still very theoretical and lack even the limited political support that the more strict version of the flat rate have. To avoid confusion between the two type of proposals, the Declaration adopts the term “collective financing system” and specifies numerous conditions under which a levy would be an acceptable form to make free culture sustainable. Thus, the critique elaborated at the FCForum of the flat rate proposals can be viewed as a left-wing critique focusing on social effects of the design and administration, rather than a right wing-critique of the legitimacy of creating a levy in the first place." (draft of the essay for Kosmos Journal, 2011)
The Charter
Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge
URL = http://fcforum.net/charter_extended
The Sources of the Charter
• draft document A2K 2005 (http://keionline.org/content/view/235/1)
• Necessary and Urgent Measures to Protect the Knowledge Society by eXgae (http://co-ment.freeknowledge.eu/text/6/)
• Consumer International. IP-watchlist09 (http://a2knetwork.org/sites/default/files/ip-watchlist09.pdf)
• Proposal made to the ONU´s World Organisation for Intellectual Property made by Amigos del Desarrollo (Friends of Development) (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Perou, Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Venezuela) (http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/scp/en/scp_11/scp_11_5.pdf)
• Asking for an open internet in Europe (http://www.euopeninternet.eu/)
• The Norwegian principles NRA.(http://www.npt.no/iKnowBase/Content/109604/Guidelines%20for%20network%20neutrality.pdf)
• FCC 4 first principles (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-260435A1.doc)
• Julius Genachowski’s speech from 21 Sept adding principle 5 & 6(http://openinternet.gov/read-speech.html)
• PiratPartiet Principles (http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english)
• Adelphi_Charter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelphi_Charter)
• BlackOutEurope (http://blackouteusp.wordpress.com/)
• Carta Europea de los Derechos Ciudadanos en la Era Digital (http://www.enriquedans.com/?s=carta&x=0&y=0)
• The Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003,
• http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
• Capetown Open Education Declaration, 2007, http://www.capetowndeclaration.org
• Open University Campaign, Wheeler Declaration, 2008, http://wiki.freeculture.org/Open_University_Campaign
• Declaration on Libre Knowledge: http://wikieducator.org/Declaration_on_libre_knowledge
• Free Software Definition: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
• The Trivandrum Declaration, Free Software, Free Society, 2005, http://fsfs.in/content/trivandrum-decleration
• Indian Free & Open Source community Charter: http://fosscomm.in/Charter
• Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services: http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/