"Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. [...] I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting."
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Wikipedia, Wikia and the Future of Free Culture
"Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipdia talks about how Wikipedia aims to give people access to the sum of human knowledge. He describes how Wikipedia is very popular across the globe. Hundreds of thousands of articles in numbers of languages. He notes how Wikipedia is a charitable organization with only 12 employees. Yet, look at the affect they have on the world. Spent $1,000,000 in 2006 - supported by small donations from people around the world. (Also gets donations of caching servers around the world.) Wales goes on to define, what he means by free access to the sum of human knowledge. “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” The Wikipedia’s license allows you the: Freedom to copy, Freedom to modify, Freedom to redistribute, Freedom to redistribute modified versions ..."
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Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg, started in 1971, is the oldest part of the modern free culture movement. Wikipedia is a relative upstart, riding on the wave of success of free software, extending the idea to other kinds of information content. Today, Project Gutenberg, with over 24,000 e-texts, is probably larger than the legendary Library of Alexandria.
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EU members, read this book
"Before the EU proposal to extend copyright, sound-recording protection from 50 to 95 years becomes law, it “would need approval by the European Parliament and a majority of the EU’s 27 governments, whose votes are weighted by population size.” Of course, whenever copyright extension comes up, Lessig comes to mind. EU citizens and policy makers should read Lessig’s book, Free Culture, before deciding..."
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Free Culture Elections
"Recently, Students for Free Culture -- a non-profit organization dear to my heart -- elected its new board. Several months ago, the group voted to hold its elections using the same preferential election method system that Debian uses. To help make their election easier I agreed to support them with a new set of features in Selectricity aimed at more structured organizational decision-making. Currently Selectricity is more geared toward more informal QuickVotes. From a democratic and voting technology perspective, the election was a huge success..."
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Setting software free: Eben Moglen and digital age morality
"Reading Eben Moglen’s keynote address, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” I felt a bit like Richard Stallman while he worked to replace UNIX with GNU: reaching the same destination but apprehensive about the other guy’s route. Moglen, a law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, discusses free software v. the behemoths of software largely in moral terms..."
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Lessig gives up on Free Culture
"Well, that's it. You'll never have to listen to Stanford professor Larry Lessig talk about Free Culture again. Lessig is moving on - to fight the good fight against "Corruption". The technology-leaning lawyer announced this last year, but has continued to discuss Wikipedia, the Creative Commons and the like. That is until yesterday, when he delivered a 'last lecture' on Free Culture at Stanford University..."
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Theora Sea, the YouTube of Ogg Theora
"...I would like to take this opportunity to talk about one of the greatest things to ever happen to Theora: the Theora Sea website. Really! And I just found out about it now, today, a hour ago. Think of it as a mix of YouTube and Digg for Ogg video only..."
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The Committee on Culture and Education wants to extend the repressive measures of the Olivennes mission at a European level
"The Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament is preparing to vote on a draft report basis about cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy. Some amendments taking again the main guidelines of the Olivennes mission have just been registered. As a matter of fact, we have sent the following message to MEPs of the culture committee..."
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Free Art License
"With this Free Art License, you are authorised to copy, distribute and freely transform the work of art while respecting the rights of the originator..."
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Lessig's last Free Culture talk, Stanford, Jan 31
"...«Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on January 31st, 2008 from 1pm-2pm. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.»
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The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) was officially launched yesterday!
"The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science."
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You can support software freedom in 2008!
Mako: "Dear free software supporter, Now is the time to join and give to Free Software Foundation. 2008 is going to be extraordinarily important year for free software. Eben Moglen likes to quote Gandhi's "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression when describing the free software movement. As I pointed out when I joined the FSF board, we're beginning to see powerful interests fighting free software. It's going to increase in the next few years. Things will probably get a lot uglier for free software before they get better. We can win but things are far from settled. The FSF is the front-line organization in this fight and we need a robust and proactive foundation, and an active and involved membership, if we're going to win.
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Swedish MPs call for legalized file-sharing
"Seven Swedish Members of Parliament from the Moderate Party have written a stirring call for the legalization of file-sharing..."
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Promoting Free software
"...What means promoting Free Software through Free Culture? It means we need to start advertising the collaboration tools in our software. We have to enable and encourage artists to share their work with other artists and with the world - just as our programmers do..."
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