[fc-uk-discuss] The BPI's Latest Claims

[Tom Chance]

On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 10:22 +0100, David M. Berry wrote:
> Now here is a place for Free Culture, to contest these figures and  
> offer alternative suggestions.  And what will we do? Send emails to  
> mailing lists and all collectively tut tut.
> 
> Where is the call to arms? What are we going to do about it? How can  
> I proactively stop this drip-drip pr campaign?
[snip]
> It is time we sorted FC out organisationally, sought funding and got  
> something up and running.

Maybe you'd like to issue this call to arms? Your email is a bit
mystical - are we to expect some further analysis from you on the kind
of organisational structure, funding opportunities and political targets
that you think FC-UK should be concentrating on? I'd be very interested
to hear your thoughts on this at length, undiluted by the usual straw
men and pithy email comments.

In terms of resisting a PR campaign, ORG has a lot of promise since they
have funding and lots of media-savvy people with good connections. We
should work with them on that end of things, whilst also of course doing
low-level stuff like letter writing, rather than trying to organise
ourselves into another crack PR unit.


On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 10:38 +0100, David M.Berry wrote: 
> Quantitatively I really don't think that much is being done by FC-UK,
> most of the local groups are inactive (perhaps reading excepted)

The measure of work being done comes from people putting the work in,
David. It was really sad to see Remix Brighton implode, and to see Remix
Deptford struggle for a vision and splinter off into sleeper cells,
Deptford.TV and so on. The meeting this Saturday will hopefully help us
tackle lots of these issues - what *are* we doing, what should we be
doing, what more could we do that would work?

> and we are hardly drawing in any new people - so the question has to
> be why? Why is the message failing to catch people alight, in fact the
> message is causing people to resign from the group... that should be
> worrying us, instead we ignore it.

Well the message is barely being transmitted, though I hope that the
newsletter is helping there. But I don't think it's just the message,
it's also the lack of action and the continuous squabbles over every
little organisational detail. We can't expect free culture to just
magically light a fire in peoples' imaginations, attracting hordes of
keen activists. Progress at this stage will only come through hard work:
building some sustainable local groups and/or national projects that can
be carried off by our small collective, and that could promise great
things to new recruits. Do that, engage with the media and potential
allies, do our own publicity and we will gradually emerge as an
attractive organisation with a reputation.

* Just geting this letter into the Guardian - nice initiative, Andy &
Tim - will be a good start;
* Keeping Remix Reading ticking over helps in many ways, and finding
ways to expand is great both for free culture theory and activism;
* The newsletter gives us visibility, and could have more content & be
more widely distributed if people were interested in helping out;
* Getting PD Burn to a useful, public stage will be a useful achievement
and put us on the map for certain geek and arts communities;
* Poking the BBC about their Creative Archive will continue to have an
effect, with the possibility of moving auntie even closer to a free
culture position;
* Talking to ORG about media and lobbying possibilities for fighting
copyright extensons will give us a lot more weight and allow us to
contribute in some small way towards the debate;
* Discussing theoretical issues and feeding our thoughts into the wider
free culture / Creative Commons communities will help raise our profile
and strengthen those wider communities. At the moment we discuss a lot
but it would be interesting if we could put together discussion
documents to feed to CC and the like;
* Writing to our MPs and keeping up the correspondence, sharing replies
with each other, helps to increase the noise level in Westminster and
keep us abreast of the issues;

It's all hard work, and if people aren't willing to do any of it, or
work on underlying structural issues to make the jobs easier, then
obviously FC-UK isn't going to be particularly active ;)

Regards,
Tom