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by Hammy Goonan I’ve been banging on to the board of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice (ACDJ) for some time that we need to stop this copyright menace, that record companies were stifling creativity and culture itself was suffering.
This is not unrelated to my growing nerd status. I love communications technology – the nuts and bolts of it – so have always been really excited about open source software. Eventually I had even made the full time transition to Linux after 3 failed attempts.
More importantly, I was excited by the intersection of these technologies with democracy. A community of programmers, coming together to build software for free, it’s an exciting idea. This, then coupled with the user driven content that gained a real sophistication with the emergence of “Web 2.0”, had me bursting at the seams to run a campaign like En Masse.
But for some reason, I just couldn’t pitch it to the ACDJ board in a way that they would agree to take the issue on.
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The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s En Masse Campaign has three main aims. To Rethink Copyright in our digital age; to Reclaim culture by encouraging people to step outside the current intellectual property regime; and to provide the tools to Redo that culture.
All culture is derivative. In other words, culture doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it builds on the past. If it weren’t for Steamboat Willy, we would never have had Mickey Mouse. If the fairy tails of the Brothers Grimm were restricted by copyright, we would never have had all the wonderful Disney cartoons that we grew up with.
However, these days, those that have built empires on exploiting the work of others that exist in the public domain (like Disney) are trying to lock down the past so that we can’t build on it as they did. This also turns out to be a rather profitable business model.
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