Notes from breakout groups:

Movement Building: This conversation revolved around the idea that to create free culture, some guiding principles or common ground must be identified. This allows us to locate our organizations within the movement, find new ways of working together and find or direct others to places for finding new resources or assistance. Our areas of interest are in technology, intellectual property and media justice/expression. Some suggested principles: - Democratic access to technology for non-commercial purposes; - Preserve peoples' ability to participate in culture and culture building; - Where public resources are being utilized, responsibility extends beyond profit; - We encourage participation.

Wireless Access: A campaign for wireless is a winning issue. It's sexy. More later.

Outside Strategies: Is media reform the end or the means? Will media democracy bring the kind of society we're looking for? Low-power FM. Disseminating information.

Fundraising/Financing: Diversifying funding. Getting past sugar daddies. DIY/Social Enterprise. How to deal with "sleeping with the enemy." How to become an ally with your funder. Are people willing to pay for independent/alternative culture? Yes if it's good and part of a campaign.

Youth/Generation: (my group) We're holding off until tomorrow to reveal what committments we're making.

Amalia Anderson, representing the league of rural voters, is leading off by highlighting the distinction between indigenous cultures and Western culture. Much of what we've been talking about, she observes, is rooted in various notions of "ownership," which are representative of the Western/European traditions and in many ways foreign to indigenous traditions. Individual ownership vs. collective ownership. "We don't tend to place an economic value on our knowledge, " she says.

At the same time she says that the Public Domain is not a trustworthy space either, as the larger Public (I'm paraphrasing) tends to pull things away from indigenous peoples; genetic mapping, the recording of traditional stories, etc.

I find some of this problematic, mostly in the sense that I don't particularly see a solid philosophical footing for indigenous-ness. This is pretty unsurprising; I can't lay any claim to that kind of title, and I'm not sure how anyone else does either? Everyone came from somewhere, it seems, and being "indigenous" really seems to mean "we got here first." That aside, I can see a great deal of value in considering the implications with regards to self-determination/agency of attempting to supplant existing governing structures and modes of communications. It seems to me that, for better or for worse, all the world's land is more or less owned, and that these issues crop up not only with "first nation" peoples, but also with independent artists getting co-opted by corporations. Similar patterns in any case. (Others echo this point out loud as I blog it).

Now Sarah Greengrass is talking about the state of intellectual property law with regard to patents in the pharmecutical industry, how international treaties deisgned to give developing nations access to the IP needed to make drugs in a time of crisis were being bogged down in protracted legal battles. However, many drug patents managed by large pharmaceutical conglomorates are actually owned by Universities, who have a mandate to serve the public interest.

Here's the opening. Beginning with an AIDS drug owned by Yale, they organized students, faculty and eventually the administration to open it up. Now they've built a coalition of universities to require drugs they patent to be covered under a license that guarantees the ability of developing nations to utilize their patents in times of need. The oganization is built through student activism and organizing research faculty, and by promoting alternative job performance metrics that take into account the social good in adition to licencing revenues.

Talking about methods: putting pressure on people through publicity; finding the legalistic weak link; simply making connections, picking up the phone or sending an email. There's a need to connect the local to national and the national to the international; again the need to create a message and disseminate it persuasively.

Another problem is how to reach people who don't necessarily have access to the latest tech. For a lot of people, CD-Rs are cutting edge. For a lot of people, broadband doesn't exist. It's important to realize that all this internet shit isn't internet only. It's internet enabled. This is a realization that's still percolating in the world. News coverage of the last election still misses this point, so it's not terrifically surprising, but still. You don't need to be online to have the internet improve your life chances as long as there's a human being or organization to make the connection.

Now we're hearing from Public Knowledge and the Center for Digital Democracy. They're talking about the domination of telco companies, the difficulties in keeping the internet free and open, the need to bridge the digital divide, to insure community/non-profit access. If the previous was about content and culture, this seems about access and infrastructure.

The legal battles are fundimental:

• Will we have the right to recieve and distribute whatever TCP/IP packets we want, or will this be controlled by the company which controls your last mile? Comcast wants to block independent media distribution which competes with on-demand service.
• Will we have the right to make Fair Use of digital cultural projects? Right now it's technically illegal to make a series of clips from a bunch of DVDs and play them for a class. "God forbid if you put it on the internet."
• Will we be able to freely innovate? The FCC wants to force technology creators who make products which create video (and audio) to get approval from them. It's totalitarian if you think about it, but it's true.
• Will we have the right to choose how we access the world of information? The telcos want to prevent communities and municipalities from providing internet access more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Sometimes the political alliances which address these issues are unexpected. A lot of the time republicans are our allies on these issues; it touches on the conservative values of freedom and free markets.

Building it up on the local level is important -- getting people at the table with their cable companies, building municipal broadband -- but it's important to take the fight national, because congress could pre-empt it all.

The converstion moving now to strategies, the importance of telling stories comes up. My own observation is that success in this arena is going to require building a national narrative that is more compelling and powerful than the campaign contributions of the telcos and industry lobbies like the MPAA and RIAA. It's there. We have the moral high ground in this struggle, but in order to mobilize this we will need to consciously construct a message.

As I'm typing this, other people are saying the same things. I'm no smarter than anyone else here, which is nice.

The conversation is turning now to action and participation; tactical maneuvers. The need to turn stories into legal affidavits for court cases. Art is talking about the need to be informed, but what can we do to go beyond "informed?"

Little bit of liveblogging from Free Culture Phase 2.

Started off with a presentation by Thenmozhi Soundararajan from Third World Majority talking about the concept of media justice and the right to communicate as a cornerstone of a movement towards a more just society, about the need to enlarge the scope to include people (farmworkers in Central America for instance) for whom a radio station is more relevant than a blog, about the need to bridge content and policy, the need for a larger "blueprint" which can tie these things together, but which need to be developed from the community level.

She also spoke briefly about the need for political activism to maintain its independence from the world of philanthropy, something that I've felt for a while. I added some of my usual gobbeldygook about the necessity of building positive visions to reach a wider audience and help prevent burnout, then a brief comment from a policy guy reminding us that "policy sets the rules" and then Downhillbattle.

Holms, Nicholas and Tiffany presented their upcoming Broadcast Machine internet TV project, speaking to the need to take aim at the mainstream, to level the cultural playing field. They spoke about the possibility of millions of people making a living as artists with the best quality rising to the top.

So then this hits me.

We need to be independent of philanthropists for activism, from corporations as artists. To make a living as artists and activists on our own terms, we must develop our own economies. The potential for these economies to develop is the real threat to the corporate establishment (such as it is). The first response is generally co-option. The second is policy, unless the situation moves too fast -- as in napster -- in which case legal action becomes the first recourse. As things move faster and faster, the more and more becomes the case.

True. Policy sets the rules, but the rules only maintain their force when people believe in them. The policy that's developing around IP in many ways violates the social contract because it is not about protecting sales, it's about protecting control (which links back to sales, but it's not a direct relationship).

There's an advantage inherant in independant culture and politics because it is less risk averse and therefore more likely to produce breakthroughs. At the moment the slow grind of everything is both stagnant and trending in bad directions, so I think we can agree that breakthroughs are needed. But we can't realistically expect the establishment to provide them.

At the same time I really feel Holms when he talks about setting our sites on being the new mainstream. Whether it's culture (indy/underground music in the top 40) or politics (reforming a major political party to break the current stalemate), the great potential of our time is to energize a generation to be different, to be ourselves, but not to do so by or through dropping out.

Up next is a more policy oriented talk.