Days of Free Culture and Knowledge (and the Subjugation of Science to Human Pleasure and Health)

Purpose

To give focus to: the diffuse acts of resistance against the terrorism of copyright currently being carried out as part of the everday life of million of ‘consumers’; the stranglehold of pharmaceutical and biotech companies over human health and society’s relationship to scientific development; The domination of our minds by mass media under corporate control (the media-industrial infotainment complex)

and

To socialise knowledge and technical expertise by creating spaces in which to enjoy sharing and enouraging the technically sophisticated to impart their skills to the broader community.

AND

To generate a forum where those involved in hitherto balkanised activity can find a language and broader context in which the similiarities of their struggles can be understood.

What is It?

A week-long carnival of excess fuelled by excessive acts of wanton generosity.

Practically, we need to decide a date.

We need to establish a portal where people can share ideas for actions and reports of acts already committed, crimes already perpetrated. It should also have a FAQ demonstating the egregious effects of the anti-social phenomena of property rights.

To persuade a wide range of groups in diverse areas of interest to participate. Everyone has knowledge and resources to share.

Assemble the necessary resources to assist those who do not yet know how to share in their sharing enterprise.

Activity Examples

- MP3, DVD trading, ripping - Scanning of text – free books - DNA sampling and GPLing - Install Linux on your neighbour’s computer - Free love - Free money - Direct actions against media corporations - Talks and workshops (e.g. progaganda about media ownership) - Knowledge sharing: non-proprietary pharmaceuticals

All activites to be determined by the participants (we would each have our own, for example). The free days of sharing should also recognise the value of small acts as well as those which are spectacular, public and political.

LIST INFO

http://www.jamie.com/mailman/listinfo/freedistro_jamie.com

or send message with ‘subscribe’ in header to freedistro@jamie.com

cadoe@snafu.de subtv@lists.nadir.org espanz@libero.it

L.A.S.E.R. Critical Science group originating in Italy and now based in different cities in Europe, They have begun discussion of a GPL equivalent for patents, trick legally but an iunteresting point of depature.

Hacklabs Another italian movement dedicated to the socialisation of knowledge, based in the occupied social centres, running courses, providing access and agitating around GNU-social radical ideas in a extra-state environment.

I'd suggest Blicero or Graffio, who elsewhere was one of the instigators for the establishemt of a Hacklab in Oventic Chiapas during the summer and is also settingup Rome's first community wireless network in Pigneto.

Access to Essential Medicines Jamie Love, from the Consumer project on Technology. From the dark side of the enclosures to the story of CIPRA. The discussion about public health allows us to get out of the online morass.

Jaromil, dyne.org and DINA Free software media tools.

Bootlab Jamie already mentioned them (Steve) in the context of DivX Codec technique, but also for their wireless project with other cultural spaces in berlin and the indexing of content within the network which leans toward actual hard disk sharing.

Chistoph Beaupoil To talk about FLUSH. How opendesign can bring free software techniques out of the ralm of the 'immaterial', and allow us to buld washing machines on the same basis (nearly).

Oekonux - Free Software Society Graham Seaman (there's a lot of sharing during revolutions!) Stefan Meretz (self-unfolding or sharinG)

Infoanarchy/Eric Moller Anything that's distributed, radical and concerned with production broadly speaking and Eric is into it. If you look at his page you'll know what I mean.

Alkan Moore Artist communities have always functioned on the basis of sharing and potlatch, Alan has did ton of research on artists movements in New York for his PhD and is really into this angle.

I'm being very anti-anglo euro centered this afternoon, soon I'll write with more.

bye,

a.

ps felix, I know I never sent you my criminalisation/IP paper, which i'll be reworking as the Sklyarov trial unfolds, so I'll mail it to you then, if you want.

L.A.S.E.R. Critical Science group originating in Italy and now based in different cities in Europe, They have begun discussion of a GPL equivalent for patents, trick legally but an iunteresting point of depature.

Hacklabs Another italian movement dedicated to the socialisation of knowledge, based in the occupied social centres, running courses, providing access and agitating around GNU-social radical ideas in a extra-state environment.

I'd suggest Blicero or Graffio, who elsewhere was one of the instigators for the establishemt of a Hacklab in Oventic Chiapas during the summer and is also settingup Rome's first community wireless network in Pigneto.

Access to Essential Medicines Jamie Love, from the Consumer project on Technology. From the dark side of the enclosures to the story of CIPRA. The discussion about public health allows us to get out of the online morass.

Jaromil, dyne.org and DINA Free software media tools.

Bootlab Jamie already mentioned them (Steve) in the context of DivX Codec technique, but also for their wireless project with other cultural spaces in berlin and the indexing of content within the network which leans toward actual hard disk sharing.

Chistoph Beaupoil To talk about FLUSH. How opendesign can bring free software techniques out of the ralm of the 'immaterial', and allow us to buld washing machines on the same basis (nearly).

Oekonux - Free Software Society Graham Seaman (there's a lot of sharing during revolutions!) Stefan Meretz (self-unfolding or sharinG)

Infoanarchy/Eric Moller Anything that's distributed, radical and concerned with production broadly speaking and Eric is into it. If you look at his page you'll know what I mean.

Alan Moore Artist communities have always functioned on the basis of sharing and potlatch, Alan has did ton of research on artists movements in New York for his PhD and is really into this angle.

Open Cultures:

Themes:

Access to Information: Open access to information. - Open Access Initiative (Darius Cuplinskas) - arxive.org - Open Distribution (Open Video Archive, etc) - freenet (freenetproject.org) -

Body: Controlling then living - compulsory licenses (Jamie Love, Ted Byfield) - L.A.S.E.R. (Patents and GPL) - CAE (contestational biology) -

The Physcial Layer: - Wirless community networks (consume.net, bootlab.de, picopeering) - Oekonux (Stefan Mertens) - Garlic.net - FLUSH

Freespeech, Free Media: - Streaming (Drazen Pantic) - Open Source Intelligence, Nologo - anonymity - freenet (see above) - Freimuth Duve (OSCE)

Greymarkets, Piracy: Freehavens and unregulated zones - Warez, can it really not be controlled? (Bruce Sterling?) - KOP, BURN (exhibition) - Piratology (Armin Medosch)

Open Security: Security can be transparent and compatible with civil society Security through obscurity vs. security through transparency. - bugtraq

IP: Copyright and Patents beyond legal theory - digital commons: first assessments of the usefulness of licensing templates

Alan, Felix -

f:

> I like the idea of including non-internet based sharing, but so that > it provides some background or broader perspective to the focus of the > event.

my impression from the conversations so far is that this event takes form around 'knowledge sharing'. knowledge sharing via (the) network(s) is a massively important component of this. but the category is broad. 'transmission' of knowledge obviously also takes place in a variety of other channels and modes. We have already considered storytelling, music, photocopying, tape-to-tape, etc. in some of the conversations. I think that this event should be an experiment in the *enabling* of the free sharing of knowledge. SOS should consider itself as an infrastructure, an architecture of such enablement. That, of course, doesn't stop us from inviting whoever we think appropriate - but I would like to feel at SOS a festival atmosphere at which people arriving become 'infected' and realise all the things they have to share. (I use as my paradigm Shu Lea Cheang's Garlic=Rich Air project -, at which people actually went home to specifically find things to trade in at the van.)

> Any idea who might be able to talk about that from, say, a broad > cultural perspective?

As the above indicates, I don't think we should limit our focus to talking about such 'issues'. SOS should *demonstrate* the potential of various technologies and strategies (such as P2P) for knowledge-sharing and do so in a way that is as approachable as possible for 'ordinary' people. In that sense, Alan's idea of a creche is a good one. I would add to it a collaborative music space in which people can experience the real joy of playing together (I am exploring casually with some folk the idea of this environment somehow being reponsive to the rest of the space in which the conference is taking place.)

> Warez

Of course there will be warez here, hopefully a lot of warez, and I would like to provide some big disks that could be stuffed full of warez and mp3s and connected to a nice fast 11Mbps wlan. That is what I would like. My only suspicion about warez is connected to my suspicions about the Kingdom of Piracy. I don't want to come over like we're 'promoting' piracy _qua_ piracy. SOS is about the flow of information and knowledge, the excess enabled by the network, and the enjoyment of that excess. I think it should not constitiute itself in opposition to, but rather in joyful (rhetorical) ignorance of, the establishment IP regime attempts to enclose this free flow. Let us be careful then not to foreground specific anti-IP discourse such as the warez community in our doings here.

> health

I think it is around issues such as molecules and 'health' (a category which it is easy to contest, but still) that people can understand the material importance of knowledge sharing (its impact on the body i.e.) The difficulty here is to show this in a positive rather than negative critique - and an involving rather than polemical one. Can Jamie Love formulate a bio-IP project that will allow people to share something, or do something with shared knowledge, that will show them how pharma IP works or something along these lines... (for example Jamie recently linked the Monde Dip article on the PDing of the human genome. Could we have copies of the human genome on disk for people to take away? How big is it? Under 520 Megs ;-)?)

Incidentally you can tell that I do not think that health is a dilution of the idea of knowledge sharing but a sharp end of it.

Alan - on symtoms/shivers: I am still with 'shivers' but i LIKE symptoms, perhaps for a strand of the thing (the shivers are just one symptom, i suppose, but we don't have to be true to the grammar of the thing - - -) For some reason 'Shivers' has really gripped me (I know, I am biased with regards she who formulated this) and I even see an image: a spring twig with a few little buds of cherry blossom, shivering with dew (warning: Flash animation). Awww.... C'mon. Can't you see it?

let me know what y'all think. I think things are shaping up nicely. I am particularly interested in whether you like the idea of a music space that could provide a mixed audio background to the event; whether the idea of the thing as a jamboree chimes with yours (i see people going from place to place taking part in different workshops, learning skills etc.).

ciao

jamie

>