Last night I went to the Open Knowledge Foundation's forum on open content. The extended subject was to be: how can we best promote open content, so that in twenty years time it's a mainstream concept in the same way that open source is to programmers?

Cory talked about being a fiction author and why, predictably ;), he thinks that being open is the only pragmatic way forward for his ilk. Creative types increasingly need to rely on charisma rather than virtuosity, and to build relationships with their audience so that the audience feels sufficiently connected to want to support them financially. The fact that Magnatune sells records at an average of US$8.20 despite people being able to pay between $5-15 suggests that Cory might be right.

Paula LeDieu from iCommons spoke about the amazing progress that Creative Commons is making worldwide, particularly in Brazil (thanks to Gilberto "Brazil is an Open Source nation" Gil) and Eastern Europe (where the top brass is openly embracing free culture as a means of protecting and promoting their cultural diversity as they integrate with the EU). She's upbeat, which is great :)

I rambled a little about the need to focus on the grassroots, on all those millions of ordinary people in the UK who don't use Flickr, who see "copy protected" on CDs but think nothing of it. So my first point was that Creative Commons, whilst being one of the best tools we have to promote free culture, is too legalistic. Conflicting license clauses, made worse by the introduction of the similar yet more restrictive BBC Creative Archive license, trap creative people in even more legal mumbo jumbo than plain old restrictive copyright. What we need is to remove lawyers from the creative sphere as much as possible. The problem is made worse by the fact that many people say "this work is Creative Commons licensed". Which license? If it has the "non-derivative" clause then I'm not very interested - that's not free to me. By focussing on the tools - CC - we're promoting a mixed message that basically boils down to "be at least a bit more permissive than copyright", but that has the consequence of making things even more complicated for remixers. I've touched on this before.

One solution that I put forward, though not one I came up with, is to start with an 'open content definition', or better a 'free culture definition'. This would lay out the freedoms that we take as fundamental and allow us to say "this license promotes free culture, but that license doesn't". We could use tools like CC but be clear about which CC clauses we endorse, and be clear that it is the freedoms that are important not the tools; the end not the means.

I also talked a little about building a stronger network of local, grounded free culture projects such as Remix Reading and Access Space. Without these free culture will remain the preserve of an elite of trendy geeks and artistes. Not only will it fail to bring free culture to the masses, and so in my eyes fail completely, but it will also miss a big opportunity to have a wider impact. More in a mo.

Last but not least we heard from Jennifer Rigby of the BBC Creative Archive. She spoke about the way in which they have incrementally expanded the archive, experimenting with different audiences to try and assess the value of the project. Basically they're taking it very slowly - too slowly for many in the room - because despite an eager commitment to opening up the archives somehow and eventually there's a lot of disagreement about how and when. One big problem is tracking down every person involved in a particular production, which needs to be done before it can be licensed. Basically most of the archive will never see the light of day because of this. Every UK citizen should give them feedback praising the project but urging them to dump the UK-only and no-endorsement clauses so it can be vanilla CC licensed. Also suggest that they build the archive into contracts for newly commissioned content, so that as much new stuff as possible goes straight in without any worries.

So then, after the other panel speakers took yet more time to talk to each other, we finally got to questions. I don't want to run over them all, just highlight a particularly important theme.

We face a situation where big business is relentlessly lobbying the Government about technology and intellectual property. Every week I see another phony consultation being launched in which big business gets 14 out of 15 seats, the remaining one going to some under-funded group like ORG or a well-meaning techie journalist. They are pushing for a near-total lockdown of culture. On the other hand we have loads of kids growing up using MySpace, file sharing networks and (in some cases) creative software. Young executives admit in confidence to digital rights nuts that once the 'nutty' older execs leave things will change in the media industry. Free software is on the ascendancy and free culture is starting to leave its mark on geeks, trendy artistes and some sections of government. But then the lockdown may be so devastating that, in ten years time, kids won't be sharing and remixing because technology and the law won't let them. Free culture might die off and be no more than an interesting footnote in the history of cultural policy.

So what do we do? Push the BBC to really go for it with the Creative Archive. They can't be seen to be lobbying government but they can make the hassles of DRM and copyright very clear. UK citizens pay the BBC through our license fees, so take up every opportunity to encourage them to go further. Help out with any local free culture projects or start your own, contribute to free software projects. The bigger we make this, the more of a parallel culture of freedom we can create alongside the lockdown mainstream, the harder it will be for industry and government to complete the lockdown. The more we embed notions of creative freedom and community in ordinary people, the harder it will be for the nasties to take that away from them.

Update: Some kind soul has put up an audio recording of the forum for those who want to listen to the whole thing.