This week's interview is with Nelson Pavlosky, co-founder of the Free Culture movement, which seeks to reform copyright and patent laws. Pavlosky, a student at Pennsylvania's own Swarthmore College, was o�ne of several students to successfully sue Diebold for the right to broadcast internal company memos regarding digital voting booths. More recently, the Free Culture movement has been called "digital communism" by Microsoft chief Bill Gates, and has been rapidly spreading to college campuses across the United States.

First, I think there�s been a lot of distortion of your movement by the mainstream media and it would help our readers if we could clear that up. What is the Free Culture movement? Why is it important?
First, I want to make it very clear: We believe that artists should get paid for their work.  Free Culture is no more about getting music for free than the American Revolution was about getting cheap tea.

Free Culture is about freedom: the freedom to create, to innovate, to express yourself, to criticize.  It's about the freedom to participate in our society and culture, and to build upon the work of those who have come before us.  We're working to give people more tools to be creative, and that means taking away legal barriers that harm creativity and innovation, and providing technological and social resources to positively encourage them.  It means removing threats to freedom of speech, enabling healthy discussion and debate.

Many of our critics claim to share our desire to promote creative work and expression, but we clearly disagree about what the best way to do that is.  The copyright expansionists seem to believe that creating a regime of absolute, eternal technological and legal control over ideas is the best way to encourage creativity and innovation.  We beg to differ.  Not o�nly does overly restrictive control harm innovation, it can be used as a weapon to silence critics and opponents.

  Ultimately, I believe that our movement should encompass everyone who wants to be more than a passive observer, a passive consumer.  If you believe that culture should be a two-way conversation and not just something that we absorb like so many sponges, then this movement is for you.  If democracy depends o�n an informed and active citizenry, then you could say that we're working towards a truly democratic culture.

Can you differentiate for our readers the difference between Free Culture, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons Project, IPac, Public Knowledge, etc?
There are three things that make FreeCulture.org unique:
1. We are a student movement. The groups that have historically been working in this space have not succeeded in building any significant presence o�n high school or college campuses, and part of our mission is to change that. You can't build a strong movement without involving the younger generation.
2. We have a strong local presence, while remaining distributed over a large geographical area. Most of the other organizations in this space do not have local chapters. This gives us the ability to truly change the way that physical communities work and to have an effect o�n local politics, rather than exclusively targeting federal policy. We also have people involved in our organization from around the world, from Finland to New Zealand, despite our current focus o�n the United States.
 3. We are working to unite the disparate interest groups, which all ultimately believe in the same underlying principles, into a coherent movement. o�ne can intuit that the EFF, CC, PK and all are part of the same movement, but there isn't a coherent narrative linking them together, and that's what we are trying to do for people.

Describe to KP readers the significance of the Diebold lawsuit. You claimed in a Mother Jones article that you�re not a voting fanatic, so how did this thing mushroom?
  It was a chance to strike a precedent-setting blow for free culture: the lawsuit touched o�n a lot of issues that we cared about. Diebold was (1) abusing copyright law to (2) suppress freedom of speech o�nline about flaws in their (3) closed-source, proprietary electronic voting machines. We sued them to stop them from sending out legal threats to people who published Diebold's leaked memos o�n the web, because we felt that the public had the right to know about possible problems with the upcoming presidential election, but the purpose of the suit was to set a precedent that copyright law cannot be used to suppress freedom of speech in this manner, not to specifically affect this election.

For your readers who haven't heard, we won our lawsuit against Diebold recently, and they had to pay our lawyers a nice chunk of money. This decision was groundbreaking, because it was the first time that section 512(f) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 had been applied. That section of the law says that if a person or corporation "misrepresents" (or lies) about having copyright protection over a piece of information, they "shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys� fees," which made our attorneys very happy, I assure you.

Luke and I didn't really get any money, because we didn't have much grounds to claim damages, but we got the satisfaction of being the plaintiffs in a landmark legal case preserving our First Amendment rights.

What would an ideal US intellectual property system look like? In other words, what is the ideal alternative to the current system?
I'm not honestly sure what the ideal is, although I have some ideas about the first steps towards an ideal system.  I think we need to return to a registration-based system, instead of awarding automatic copyrights o�n everything; we need a shorter, reasonable copyright term like that given to us by the founding fathers; we need to reform the patent office and stop it from giving out patents o�n business models and software.  However, the laws follow the attitudes of the people: the civil rights movement changed the hearts and minds of the citizenry before it changed the government, and that's more of our focus at FreeCulture.org.

Although we need have certain basic freedoms in order to create and communicate, some of which have been or are being taken away from us and therefore require legal/legislative reform, what's really important is the cultural context. The best example is the free software movement: the ability to build a world wide community of free software programmers, in corporations, bedrooms and garages around the world, is a direct result of the internet, but it is not a necessary result.

People had to come together with ideas of cooperation: the open source development model depends o�n a culture that understands how to integrate the work of individuals from hundreds of different countries without ever meeting face-to-face, that understands how to develop software without proprietary control, business models that make money while allowing people to share knowledge and cooperate. 

A "Free Culture" is a culture of freedom: technological advances enable freedom to a degree that was not possible in the past, and it's essential that we build a culture that understands those freedoms and how to live in a free society. Think of a country that is emerging from under a totalitarian government into democracy: a democratic government isn't of much use without a culture that understands how democracy works, and a citizenry that is empowered to properly use the system.

Why and how did this issue become important to you personally?
Luke Smith and I began as Linux users and fans of open source software, and we decided to start a local club to fight for software freedom, to battle bad government policies and monopoly control. We didn't really conceive of it as a larger cultural movement affecting things beyond computers until we began reading Lawrence Lessig's work and watching o�ne of his speeches o�nline. Lessig built a lot of his ideas off of the free software movement, as he said in his book Free Culture, but he showed how the same concepts applied to art and music, news and media literacy, patents and generic drugs... we're still exploring the ramifications of this "free culture" perspective o�n technology and society that Lessig and other thinkers collectively discovered

. Talk a bit about the INDUCE Act � why is it so important? 

It would overturn the Supreme Court's decision in the Betamax case, where the entertainment industry unsuccessfully tried to get the VCR banned, which set an important precedent protecting innovative technology companies from old media. The Betamax decision said that it's OK for you to produce and sell a piece of technology, so long as it has "substantial non-infringing uses". In other words, so long as there are serious legal uses of your technology, you can't be held responsible if your users also use the technology illegally. I call this principle "don't ban hammers"... you can kill people with hammers, but a lot of people use them for legitimate things like building houses. If this decision had gone the other way, we wouldn't have the VCR, and who knows what other technology we would not have today without the protections that the precedent in Betamax gave to innovators. 

The INDUCE Act would replace the relatively objective "substantial non-infringing uses" standard with a rather subjective standard that says that if your product can be said to "induce" people to infringe copyrights, then you can be held liable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote up a mock legal complaint that could be filed against Apple Computers if the Induce Act passed: it says that the iPod has too big of a hard drive for normal people to fill it with legal music, therefore Apple is "inducing" people to download music off filesharing networks to fill those hard drives and profiting from copyright infringement (as the iPod wouldn't be as attractive if filesharing weren't possible). It may sound ludicrous, but it's not so ludicrous under the Induce Act that it would get thrown out of court, it would require significant litigation to end such a lawsuit. If the Induce Act passed 5 years ago, we would not have the iPod.

The Induce Act would give old media frightening power over innovation: basically it would give the "content industry" the ability to veto new technology that they don't like.

Fortunately we've been able to stop the Induce Act from passing so far, with the help of tech companies such as Google and Yahoo, but there's still maybe a 50/50 chance that INDUCE will return again this congressional session and we'll have to stop it again.

Rather less fortunately, the media corporations have convinced the Supreme Court to hear the Grokster case, a case which also has the potential to overturn the Betamax decision, so the industry may not even need INDUCE. It's sad that the Supremes decided to take the case, as Betamax is a wonderful precedent, and it seems unlikely that they will be willing to leave it unchanged now that they've taken the case up.

It's unclear how they could improve upon it, so our main hope is to impress upon them how much the Betamax case has supported innovation and protected new industries from beinng smothered by the old.

Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying �some new modern-day sort of communists�want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.� Are you a modern-day communist? What�s Bill not understanding?
As an aside, I thought that "terrorism" was the new buzzword for all that is evil in the world... Mr. Gates is behind the times, he should have called us terrorists.

Seriously, it is a gross mischaracterization to call us communists, roughly as accurate as us calling Bill Gates a fascist; we don't advocate a statist, centrally planned economy or the death of the free market. It's also completely false to say that we believe that there shouldn't be incentives for artists and innovators to create, and copyright certainly does provide some incentives to create. Copyright is good insofar as it encourages creativity, but it is bad insofar as it inhibits creativity. Unfortunately, copyright today threatens to reach the point where it inhibits more creativity than it encourages.

Copyright has expanded dramatically in length, scope and power since the founding fathers created it. The founding fathers set copyright lengths at 14-28 years; copyright is now life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years for corporations. The founding fathers required people to register with the copyright office in order to hold copyrights; today everything is automatically copyrighted the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium. The moment you make a scribble o�n a napkin, that scribble is copyrighted.

 Similar changes have happened in the world of patents: o�ne can now apply for patents o�n software, and even o�n business models. Amazon patented o�ne-click shopping. A company called Acacia claims to have patented all streaming media o�nline. There is a parasitical entity called Ideaflood which exists o�nly to buy up patents and sue people who are trying to create things which rely o�n ideas that they claim to own. Ideaflood claims to have patented the idea of subdomains, and they sent legal threats to Livejournal.com, which offers its customers web addresses such as yourname.livejournal.com. Many people are worried that in emerging fields such as nanotechnology, the massive number of overlapping patents that have been granted will make it impossible for ANYONE to create in the future without purchasing every patent in the field.

O�ne has to ask whether granting people "intellectual property rights" is always the best way to provide incentives to creators; we need to allow future generations to create as well. As Lawrence Lessig likes to say,

-Creativity and innovation always builds o�n the past.
 - The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
- Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
- Ours is less and less a free society.

Creativity does not exist in a vacuum. If everything is owned, and you have to ask permission before you build off of anything in the culture around you, that's a problem. There's also the problem of access to information: if proprietary control over information inhibits research and understanding, then that's going to decrease the amount of innovation and creativity that we have in our society.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing o�n the shoulders of giants." �Sir Isaac Newton

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing o�n my shoulders." �Hal Abelson

Do you have any other involvement in politics?
 As a Quaker, I am opposed to the use of lethal force and I believe that we have better ways to deal with conflict, or at least that we could develop better methods if we put more effort into it. I was active in the peace movement in the days leading up to the Iraq war, but I became very disillusioned after the protests failed to stop the war from moving forward. I think that wars are generally the result of a breakdown in communication, of an inability to see the "other side" as human. Perhaps the best way to bring an end to war is to make the world more connected, o�n a person-to-person, peer-to-peer level... which is what we are trying to do at FreeCulture.org.

Name o�ne opponent to the goals of Free Culture who you respect and/or admire and talk a bit about why.
It's a bit hard to talk about people who I don't interact with and whom I haven't met. Our main opponents are corporations and their allies, and we don't really see them at our schools. There aren't really any student groups that are opposed to us (at least not o�n our current campuses), and we haven't had an opportunity yet to meet our legislative opponents o�n Capitol Hill. So far they're just an amorphous, faceless mass to us ;-)  

What should people do to help achieve the goals of Free Culture?
 Little things can add up. Simply whenever you have the choice between being a passive observer, a mere consumer, or being something more... choose participation. Be an equal in a peer-to-peer society, rather than just the receiving end of a broadcast culture. We're working with a lot of other people to help lower the barrier to entry for participation, but ultimately the choice is yours. Of course, the true danger is that this choice may be taken away from us if we don't fight for it, and that's why we need you to join your local chapter of FreeCulture.org, or help us start o�ne if it doesn't exist yet.


 Proust Mini-Questionnaire:
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, who/what would it be?
I'd come back as a writer. When I was little, I wanted to be an author, but at some point I realized that writers spend a lot of time by themselves, writing alone in their rooms. I love people, and I decided that life wasn't for me, but I wonder what it would be like if I chose that solitary life. I still play and write music, because that seems to involve more personal interaction, but I've largely dropped creative writing, and it makes me sad. Maybe I'll get back to it someday.

 What do you most value in your friends?
 Communication and honesty. I can forgive my friends just about anything so long as they're open and willing to work through things.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
That's hard to say, it changes with every book I read. I'm currently enamoured of some heroes from the light-hearted fantasy series, Xanth, written by Piers Anthony. Everything in Xanth cross-breeds with everything else, resulting in o�ne hero who is half human, a quarter ogre and a quarter river nymph, who is friends with a winged centaur. Since I'm multiracial, I felt a bond with these heroes, as silly and pun-ridden as the novels may be. I've always felt that those who remix skin colors and religions and genders are the true Americans: America is special because it is a melting pot. I've always felt that remixing culture is an important part of that tradition, and the purists who cringe when they hear mashups of the Beatles are running o�n the same philosophy that gave us the blueblooded nobility of old, and which gives us purebred dogs that have wonderful diseases due to lack of genetic diversity. It's the philosophy that tells us that the best is in the past, that art has to be hands off, that what the original creator envisioned was the ideal, and that we can o�nly soil and degrade their creation. The belief that we can't improve upon the past is dangerous: worse, it's mortally depressing. If the best is in the past, what more do we have to live for?