A jumble of thoughts here. First, for those lucky hackers enjoying the Malaga sun at aKademy, a few thoughts about promoting KDE there. The first is a request to put a link to any photos you stick up on this wiki page). The second is to try and write up any interesting developments on your blog, the wiki, or better yet as an article submitted to the Dot, LWN or any other publication you think you might get it published in. If you're not a very confident writer then leave stuff in your blog or the wiki and others can pick your thoughts up and mangle them into an article; I'm thinking of writing a summary of the big stories for Newsforge, for instance, so I'll depend upon plenty of good info coming out.

Last year we got tonnes of press coverage. We can get plenty this year even without the little press team that Fab, Michael and myself ran last year if everyone has promotion in the back of their minds.

Feeling old

Seeing the first photos dribble in has only made the overcast weather in Reading (UK) worse. The town is full of kids here to see rock! (say that with a gruff voice and the devil's hand thingummy) at the Reading Festival. Wandering around in my hippyish clothing I get paranoid that people will mistake me for one of them - I live here, damnit! Hmm, my cantankerous response makes me feel old, which is made worse by the fact that I haven't heard of half the bands playing, and dislike most of the others. It reminds me of last year at aKademy 2004 when several people were surprised to meet a 21 year-old Tom - they thought I was at least 40 from my emails! Now back to pulling out some more carrots from my garden to the soundtrack of the finest free culture podcast around...

Free software

Well actually, after one more ramble. I've been mulling over various ideas in preparation for my MA, including an essay I want to write that will make a start at defining a moral argument for free culture. Basically Stallman's position is quite confusing and ambiguous. He leans towards a Kantian position, saying that it is our moral duty to release software under a free license because one cannot consistently will that somebody would abridge your freedoms by not doing so. But he also talks of the bad consequences of not sharing freely, a feature that most other writers I've come across emphasise almost exclusively. Lessig constructs consequentialist legal arguments, and only seems to think that we should share more because a commons is necessary in parallel with proprietary cultural products.

Well, although I've always adopted Stallman's insistence that free software is an ethical position rather than a practical or technical one (a-la Eric Raymond), I'm unsure where I stand on this ambiguity. At the moment I'm inclined to say that nobody has a natural right to dictate what you can and cannot do with information they produce, but that society can forgo certain freedoms if the consequences are better than the alternative (as is the spirit of most copyright law). OK, so if we're concerned with advocating rules such as "you may restrict society's rights to use, copy and modify your information if the consequences are better than unfettered rights" then we need to determine what consequences we're interested in.

There are obvious technical and political consequences that are often discussed - proprietary software may be worse, I need to modify the software I use, I need to be sure nobody is spying on me, my government shouldn't be tied to one software vendor, and so on. But when you step into the world of culture, these don't always apply, and even where they do most current free culture schemes have nothing to say. For instance, Creative Commons licenses say nothing about releasing the source files to a piece of music, so a musician looking to remix may have the right but not the ideal resources to exercise that right. This is where I'm then inclined to talk about virtues instead - Creative Commons at least promotes sharing, creativity, commonality and so on.

So here's my idea at the moment: we start with the claim that nobody has any natural property rights over non-rivalrous goods like information. We then say that society can extend property rights that are conditional, according to rules of consequence. There are then three categories of consequences to consider: those that concern human rights (political, economic, social, cultural); those that concern our everyday needs (technical, practical, etc.); and those that concern virtues conducive to human flourishing (sharing, creativity, etc.). We can then say that the current UK copyright term of life plus 70 years is unethical because it protects no human rights, and it only meets the everyday needs and promotes the virtues for a small minority of the population.

On that final note, if you're in the UK and you agree that the current copyright terms are daft, consider adding your testimony to Free Culture UK's new petition, which we'll present to MPs around the country and to the Minister for Creative Industries and Tourism (currently James Purnell MP).