We got a little bit of coverage with our response to the BPI's plans to kick people off the net if they've brushed up too close to a little music piracy. It's always nice to read people writing comments along the lines of "I'm going to vote Green! Exactly what i would have said, they have brains!"

It has been a funny year for the industry. Massive acts have been releasing music for free, which gets a mixed reception amongst the 99% of musicians who aren't going to get millions from voluntary payments and gigging. At the same time the true dinosaurs in the industry are getting hot under the collar about piracy again when you think they'd be putting all of their energy into the growing online media market.

As individuals who create, and perhaps earn something of an income from our work, all we can do is to keep creating and finding ways to earn whilst sharing as much as possible. Artists and/or their collectives are all entrepreneurs - or unsuccessful. We'll keep pressing for a more liberal copyright policy from the Green Party end, with more of an emphasis on the cultural commons and the need to find business models that are better than iTunes (lock you into their proprietary systems) and the BPI's proposal.

I had a great time in Liverpool at the Open Source City, many thanks to Folly for feeding and watering me! Liverpool's a great city - I've never been there before - lots of grand stone facades, friendly, friendly people and some interesting little arts venues run out of slightly dilapidated properties with the permission of landlords.

As promised, I've uploaded all my material from my talk about the philosophy of free culture. You can grab my slides, my short paper on my own Green approach to the subject, my masters dissertation on a Lockean approach to Free Culture and my undergraduate dissertation on Marxism and the Hacker Ethic!

Now I need a rest... too much time on trains, clubbing in the East End, working on my presentation and not really sleeping properly has taken it out of me!

I'm speaking at the Open Source City micro-festival, part of the European Capital of Culture programme. If you're in the area then there will be some good talks, workshops and performances. From the blurb - "Open Source City tips its hat to Liverpool’s pioneering spirit by offering a programme of art, workshops, masterclasses, talks and concerts that shed light on the growing impact of Free/Libre Open Source Software on the creative practices of today, in particular in media art and music."

I'll be talking about a few philosophical perspectives on intellectual property, using Kant, Locke and Marx as my starting points. Should we follow Richard Stallman in thinking that there is a categorical imperative to share freely? Perhaps the nonrivalrous nature of information means there is a good case to leave it in common rather than seeking private ownership? Or should we be more concerned with the act of creation, the way in which people labour on ideas and information, and encourage spaces in which we can engage in unalienated labour?

To keep it grounded I'm going to use examples from communities I've been part of, namely KDE, Remix Reading and OpenStreetMap.

We've got the answers to the other questions we submitted, predictably vague but useful nonetheless (for campaign quotes, and just in building up the pressure to do something). You can read the questions and responses on Hansard, but I particularly like the look of this bit:

For central government bodies other than trading funds, the clear policy is that raw information should, subject to any statutory provision, be freely available or provided at the marginal cost of dissemination.

That's good to know, and backs up the Green Party's case for making it accessible as well, e.g. Parliamentary procedure in an open, machine-readable format rather than plain HTML, or key data on domestic energy use in one place as a canonical source rather than being scattered across different sections of government departments (Defra, BERR, CLG, etc.)

There's a nice piece in the Guardian today summarising recent developments, well worth a look. It would be nice if we could supply those guys with a decent set of OpenStreetMap graphics for use in articles rather than using non-free sources too!

The Government has responded to the first of several questions I drafted for Tim Beaumont, the Green member of the House of Lords. We want to pile on the pressure so that the Labour Government takes the report they commissioned seriously, and to find out if they intend to act on any specific parts. One very general question - asking "whether they intend to make the Ordnance Survey's MasterMap available free of financial or legal restrictions" - got this response:

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Andrews): As announced in the Budget, the Government will look closely at public sector information held by trading funds including Ordnance Survey, to distinguish more clearly what is required by government for public tasks and ensure that this information is made available as widely as possible for use in downstream markets. In the lead up to the next spending review, the Government will ensure that information collected for public purposes is priced so that the need for access is balanced with ensuring that customers pay a fair contribution to the cost of collecting this information in the long term. In the mean time Ordnance Survey will continue to generate the revenue it requires to cover its costs, to fund investments and to provide a return to government, from sales of paper mapping and from licensing use of the Crown copyright and Crown database rights in its data, including OS MasterMap.

So no surprises there, but the spending review is definitely a good campaign target. If the Government took their own research seriously, and approached Ordnance Survey's funding a little more creatively (e.g. with land registry surcharges), then communities like OpenStreetMap would be able to open up hugely beneficial opportunities. Expect a report from the Green Party on this whenever I get the time to finish it off!

I came across this great web site created by the Institute for Fiscal Studies - Where do you fit in?

Enter your household income, council tax and dependents then it will show you where you lie in the UK's income distribution. It turns out that I earn more than 77% of the UK's population, although I never thought that ~£20k in London made me particularly rich. A friend of mine on ~£31k is in the top 7% for the country!

It just goes to show how we can take our income for granted, how unrealistic young people's inflated expectations are, and that the working poor represent a huge stain on Labour's supposed social democratic concerns.

I've been setting up the toolchain for Mapnik on our new fully managed internet server at work. We're hopefully going to make quite extensive use of OpenStreetMap for at least two projects in the near future: One Planet Living in Sutton and The Laundry, our company who do office recycling in London.

So far I've managed to render some pretty large images of specific areas in London, including this rather large render of the whole city (5000x3856px, 20MB). The docs on the wiki aren't the easiest to follow, but I'm looking forward to playing with the styles, adding clickable points of interest, and providing specific maps for public transport, cycling, pedestrians etc. in Sutton.

I've also been out and about mapping bits of London, including getting Rachel really enthusiastic about mapping the area where she lives. I've taken advantage of the unseasonably sunny weather to map Burgess Park (I love doing parks in lots of detail), part of Clapham with Rachel, and more cycle routes & cycle parking whenever I'm on the move. I'm particularly glad to have sought out some public cycle parking around the Houses of Parliament, mostly you're greeted with warnings about cycles being nicked by the police but for the record the best place is down Millbank next time you're popping into the Commons!

My fringe session on free software and data went well last night, we discussed the issues, possible policy and campaigns on what is a pretty niche subject. My cause was helped by the organisers using OpenStreetMap's coverage in the conference pack to show people how to get around - a nice treat for me since I helped map this area!

I started out by describing why Greens should care about "intellectual property", touching on the potential for free information to empower communities, taking control from centralising corporations to promote small and medium-scale social enterprise and exploring/defending/deepening alternative property forms such as the commons; also classical environmental concerns like the availability of data and research on climate change, e-waste created by Microsoft Vista's upgrade cycle, and so on.

I then introduced some context, namely:

• How Greens led the fight against software patents;
• Our policies promoting free software and access to information, also captured in various places in our manifesto;
• The amazingly successful media campaign against Microsoft Vista;
• Our collaboration on the free software, free society open letter promoting free software;
• Commentary and opposition to the Windows-only and DRM-full BBC iPlayer platform.

Participants fleshed out various ways of looking at the problems, including: open access scientific journals, and the comparative cost of open access versus paid access models; the quality of data available; the formats and standards in which data is made available; legal and technical restrictions on data; working cultures that lead to these problems and a general culture of excessive centralisation & restriction. So quite comprehensive!

Two nice practical ideas came out, which was a relief...

First, access to electoral data including boundaries (wards, constituencies, etc.), election results (that vary in format and quality across council web sites) and the postcode database. In Brighton, Jason Kitkat wanted to set-up a "who is your councillor" web page but couldn't because of the post codeissue. We could talk to people like ORG, mySociety, the British Computer Society, OKFN and others to represent this issue to the Electoral Commission. A bit dorky, perhaps, but maybe an easy win?

The second is to see if we can convince someone in a council that we have some political power in - i.e. Brighton, Lewisham, Norwich or Oxford - to assist OpenStreetMap more directly. For example they could notify OSM volunteers when streets, amenities etc. are created or change.

I'm hoping to turn a list of email addresses into a working group, with a view to submitting a policy motion in the Autumn conference and developing those campaigns in the meantime. Fingers crossed, stay posted!

We've been making progress on cycling routes and facilities in south London:

I've been putting cycle parking in on my route to & from work. My technique is pretty simplistic - memorise the positions of three or four as I cycle through, then quickly stick them in when I arrive! There are absolutely loads, though, in Streatham so it's going to look quite cluttered when I'm done.

The Wandle trail was mostly mapped by others but I cycled down it about a month ago to fill in some gaps and improve the actual River Wandle in places. The same goes for route 22 in the London Cycle Network, I've done it all from Peckham Rye Common up to Old Kent Road and now I see somebody has finished it up to the river.

All in all, south London is starting to fill out nicely. I'm just having trouble motivating myself to do any significant mapping lately, especially when it means going on a bit of a mission through a dirty noisy city to follow a poorly signposted cycle route!

The Green-EFA Alliance have put together this silly little video as part of the I wouldn't steal campaign. The Greens have been leading the fight against laws that protect multinationals' profits at the expense of ordinary citizens, and artists who create those films. Here's the vid:

A cabal met up this Wednesday and so the free art show is definitely going to happen, hooray! The best kind of Green politics - combine a practical celebration of your ideals with some alternative propaganda and persuasion. I need to get on with mapping the rest of the area around the gallery on OpenStreetMap. Then I can produce public transport maps to convince those dafty North Londoners that it's not that difficult to reach Old Kent Road :).