"Tthorough discussion of enclosure must consider the international institutions that impose it. The International Monetary Fund is a well-known example; its "rescue" agreements attack the intellectual commons through "user fees" for public school, which prevent millions of poor children from attending.

"Free culture advocate and Brazilian Minister Gilberto Gil said that digital technology offers a rare opportunity to bring knowledge to under-privileged people around the world and to include them in the political process..."

"This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Free Culture 2008, hosted by Students for Free Culture (an organization whose Georgetown chapter I started last semester). The organizers did a great job bringing together a wide array of participants for a fun, informative weekend..."

"While communication technologies have created a world flush with knowledge, creativity, and communication, works of culture are more tightly controlled and restricted today than ever before. A rapidly expanding copyright regime makes the use, modification and distribution of almost all documented human expression the exclusive right of its creator. Copyright today is automatic, extensive, and lasts for more than a century. Our culture today, is owned..."
via copyrighteous http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20071211-00

Free Software Foundation Europe is ten years old this March. FSFE was founded in 2001 as "an organization dedicated to Free Software activities in Europe" and "the official sister organization of the Free Software Foundation in the United States" in Europe. Today, FSFE works across Europe and around the world.

"Brazilian minister of culture Gilberto Gil Moreira speaks on the transformative power of digital technologies..."

"...Juris’ book provides an ethnographic study of anti-corporate globalization movements [...] «Because they use tools such as email lists, Web pages and free software to organize actions, share information, and coordinate at a distance, anti-corporate globalization networks have become models for emerging forms of directly democratic politics,» Juris says.

Claudio Prado, digital policy coordinator for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, put it succinctly when he expressed the view that intellectual property law is a 20th-century idea and "most of the blossoming of world civilisation has happened perfectly well without it - The 20th century is a cul-de-sac," he says.

Karsten Gerloff is the current president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, the European sister organization of the FSF. He began his LinuxCon Europe 2012 talk, entitled "All watched over by machines of loving grace", by focusing on a number of technological trends.