Hi everyone, I'm really enjoying all the conversation today!
> From: Karl Fogel <[email protected]> > > One of the traps of rebuttals is that even as they refute every > individual point, they still end up affirming the overall frame of > reference & assumptions of the piece being rebutted. This rebuttal > needs to refute the worst points (and rhetorical excesses) in Lowery's > piece, but it also needs to completely reframe the issue. Agreed. One strategy might be to return to Emily's original NPR blog post. Her original frame was descriptive: young people's listening culture is organized around streaming and sharing. She then went on to speculate about how best to compensate artists given this reality. >From the start, she never even considered an artifact-based music economy. > From: Elizabeth Stark <[email protected]> > > FWIW, lots of folks that spent years involved in the free culture movement > were directly involved in organizing the anti-SOPA campaign (Fred, Parker, > Tiffiniy, Holmes, myself). There's an interesting parallel with the Occupy movement here. Many on-the-ground Occupy organizers were trained up a decade ago in the anti-globalization movement. Elizabeth points to a similar legacy of free culture activism. For Occupy, the ambiguity is constructive because it makes the movement seem like a passionate popular response to recent injustice. This is preferable to the alternative story: "same old hippies banging drums in the park." In constrast, my sense is that the ambiguity is counter-productive for free culture (internet freedom?). The lack of a clear history makes it easier to portray us as mere Silicon Valley astro-turfing. > Here's one example of a particularly outlandish claim to Google's > orchestration of the movement: > http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2012/01/24/the-real-reasons-google-killed-sopapipa/ Let me play devil's advocate for a moment: Google clearly does not orchestrate the movement but it has provided considerable financial support. Because of this, it's not difficult for skeptics to construct a strong conspiracy theory. Fun exercise: Which corporation appears on all of these pages? (Hint: it starts with a 'G.) * http://conf11.freeculture.org/about/ * http://www.fsf.org/patrons * https://creativecommons.net/supporters/ * http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/about/support * http://openvideoconference.org/supporters/ * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors Given that Google is not a mission-bound non-profit like Mozilla and that its business model involves selling ads on anything that shows up on the web, I think it behooves SFC (and the free culture/internet freedom movement at large) to express exactly how we are NOT a corporate conspiracy. Step one is increased visibility of student activists. Student voices will help to challenge the notion that this is all astro-turf. Kevin _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
