Public Activists
There are a few important players in the public sphere, although there is rarely much connection between them and they frequently have disparate goals. Some seek to protect civil liberties and encourage collaboration, while others lobby for the full-blown reform of copyright law.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit advocacy and legal group founded in 1990 dedicated to advocating for the public interest. The foundation takes a multidisciplinary approach to its actions and employs employs lawyers, policy analysts, activists and tech experts. Financially, the foundation is sustained 2/3 by donations, with the remainder coming from a trust fund.
The most prominent actions of the foundations are its court fights. The EFF volunteers to defend people, and has litigated such cases as MGM v. Grokster, Apple v. Does, ALA v. FCC, and Online Policy Group v. Diebold. The EFF also runs an Action Center to fight adverse legislation.
Pirate Party
The Pirate Party was founded in Sweden, where it is a registered party that gained .63% of votes in the last elections for parliament. Though the party didn't do well enough to get any seats in parliament, they are already planning for the next elections in 2010. Since then the Pirate Party has appeared in many other countries including the U.S. Wikipedia has a world map that shows where the Pirate Party is active.
The Pirate Party U.S. was founded on June 6, 2006 by Brent Allison and Alex English. The purpose of the Pirate Party is to give the Internet society a voice on the issues that affect us. They claim that Washington tries to govern the Internet, yet they have no idea about the culture and values of the people that make up this society. The party seeks to address the following three issues: Copyright, privacy and net neutrality.
The Pirate Party's stance on copyright is that currently copyright law is not representative of the founder's intent. Copyright law is stronger than it was before, and the Pirate Party believes that Congress has lost track of what copyright law is supposed to do. They believe that copyright law should promote distribution of works as rapidly and widespread as possible. In order to restore copyright to its original purpose they plan on addressing four major areas. The first approach they want to take is to rescind all the copyright acts that have been passed since 1790. Second they want to retroactively apply the 14 year copyright term to past copyrights. Their next approach is to cease the criminalization of noncommercial works distribution. Lastly they call for the repeal of the provisions of the DMCA that limit innovation, freedom and the rights of users.
The Pirate Party seeks to protect and reclaim the rights to privacy of the people. They want to repeal the provisions of the Patriot Act that allow the government to intrude into people's privacy. They also want to limit the use of SSN as a form of identification. They want the government to use the SSN only in certain cases where federal law mandates it be used, and make it illegal if used otherwise. The party wishes to make illegal the collection of citizen's information without their explicit consent.
The Pirate Party wants net neutrality; they want the internet to allow the free flow of information between people. They want the ISPs that are getting in the way of this to stop and not disregard their customer's interests.
The Pirate Party is still on its early stages and is still trying to get organized in the U.S. The party is still debating what issues it should focus on and what additional plans of action might be possible.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a tax-exempt charitable corporation founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig. They provide an alternative system of copyright licenses for creators who want to exercise some of their copyrights but at the same time encourage people to use their work. They allow creators to declare some rights reserved and offer different types of licenses that may fit the way authors want their work to be used.
The first step for creators is to select a license and declare whether the work is to have some rights reserved or be available for the public domain. This will attach html code to the work so that people who come into contact with it know what license it is under.
The Creative Commons advises people who want to license their work to review all the licenses available and consult with a lawyer to choose a license that best fits their needs. The Creative Commons only provides the copyright; they do not enforce them when someone breaks a license, that is still the creator’s job. Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable, so once the creators have licensed their work they cannot change the license they want to apply. However, the license does allow the creator to later grant someone else a non-exclusive license. These licenses also do not affect fair use: people can still use the creator’s work under copyright exceptions.
The Creative Commons allows many people to participate in their projects, and uses a wiki to encourage community participation. It allows people to attend conferences, become part of discussion lists and even get CC involved with their local communities. They also provide information on how developers, creators, lawyers and even college students can be directly involved with CC.
CcLearn is a division of Creative Commons that seeks to minimize the barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials. They have classified these barriers into three types: legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers. With legal barriers, they want licensing for educational materials under interoperable terms. They also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education. With technical barriers, they promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse. Finally with social barriers, they encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational material available online and to build upon each other’s contributions. One of their projects is Open Education Search, which will direct search engine traffic to Open Educational Resources.
Jamendo
Jamendo is a music platform that serves as a new model for artists to promote, publish and be paid for their music. Jamendo is unique because it incorporates the following:
- A legal framework protecting the artists (using the Creative Commons licenses).
- Free, simple and quick access to music for everyone.
- The use of p2p technologies like BitTorrent and eDonkey for legal distribution of music.
- The possibility of making direct donations to the artists.
- An adaptive music recommendation system based on iRATE to help users discover new artists.
The use of the Creative Commons licenses allows users to download, share, and remix the songs they download depending on the license of the song. Jamendo provides ease of use, users can search for content they like easily and have the option to stream music or download it using BitTorrent or eDonkey.
Jamendo uses a unique model for paying the artists that participate. They distribute among artists 50% of their advertising revenue. The money is distributed to artists based on how many people viewed the artist’s page. They also allow users to donate money to artists they like which, minus a small transaction fee, goes directly to the artists.
Students for Free Culture
Students for Free Culture started as the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, a student group at Swarthmore college founded in 2003. Originally focused largely on software, the group expanded its scope of activities after being inspired by Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" speech from 2002.
The Swarthmore organization came to national attention very shortly after their founding due to controversy surrounding Diebold, a maker of electronic election systems. When many of Diebold's internal emails where leaked to the internet, partially confirming worries about their machines and business practices, the students posted the emails on their website. Diebold sent legal threats asking for the emails to be taken down, claiming that the emails were their intellectual property. The students refused and contacted the EFF, who informed them that they could sign on to an already-begun lawsuit against Diebold brought the Online Policy Group, a non-profit ISP in a similar situation. The EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic represented OPG and the Swarthmore students pro bono. The case ended with the judge deciding that posting the emails was a fair use.
In 2004, the FreeCulture.org launched, which began the transformation of the Swarthmore organization into Students for Free Culture. The organization has campaigned against the INDUCE act, business method patents, and digital rights management, and has celebrated movements such as Creative Commons. Students for Free culture has since become an international organization, with many different chapters.
