Fernando Paniagua, Andreu Meixide, and Ester Villacampa. Photos by Pere Albiac. “Opening night” by Rafa de los Arcos. CC BY 4.0.: More than 1500 people attended the last edition of BccN (Barcelona Creative Commons Film Festival), celebrated in this city from June 7th to 11th. In 2010, it was the first worldwide festival for films licensed under Creative Commons, and eight years later, it is much more than that. With digitalization, there comes a new distribution of power, the critical review of intermediaries, and the active role of citizenship both in the reception and the creation of content. Creative Commons licenses are a tool that helps us to deal with these motivating changes, in particular with intellectual property in the digital era. They are part of our political stance, in the intersection between free culture, common good and cinema, as we are constantly fostering new models of positive social relationship based on the logics of the Internet.

BccN has been hosted for all these years by MACBA (Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona), but screenings are also set up in cinemas (like Zumzeig this year) or public spaces as determined by the community. BccN puts different topics on the table through films, performances, discussions and hybrid shows (such as live cinema or work in progress). This year, the programme conceived by Panorama 180, the non profit organisation behind the festival, drew an imaginary line from communities to Commons, under the slogan of “Sharing is caring” – communities that fight to preserve either their rights or their natural resources. Among international guests, OvO (a duo with Noriko Okaku and Akihide Monna), offered a workshop and a performance in the consideration of memory, and Marc Meillassoux, the young director of Nothing to Hide presented his work. The film deals with surveillance and the misleading argument of “I have nothing to hide”

On Saturday, we also released the digital platform CCWorld (Media Commons Network). CCWorld is a network of festivals from all over the world, which aims to share, extend and promote audiovisual works that follow openness and free culture criteria. CC World is a network of free adhesion and peer collaboration on a global scale for local action and transformation. Since 2012, Panorama 180 puts at disposal of any interested collective or person all the materials generated in the realization of its own festival (from films to press notices), with the only condition that they return to the community new materials and knowledge acquired. This is intended to guarantee the sustainability of a common resource, as well as its renewal.

As a result, there are more than 25 nodes holding fully self-managed festivals around the world which, at the same time, are part of a collaborative and decentralized governance network. Organizers of Bogotá CC & New Media Film Festival (running for three years now), Valladolid CC Film Festival (5 editions), La Conca de Barberà CC Film Festival and the one which will take place in Prague next year were invited to the meeting. Each of them have their own flavor, from small locations to big cultural events.

CCWorld, as each of its festivals, tries to put a spotlight on the benefits of free circulation of culture and technology, as well as their transformation and appropriation by small communities. We believe culture, as any other Common, should be treated as a right instead of something to speculate with, and digitalization opens the window to collaboration and community. This is the reason why we would like to invite local collectives to join the community in order to share their own festival.

The post CCWorld: Connecting Worldwide Creative Commons Film Festivals appeared first on P2P Foundation.

European copyright law dates from 2001 (before the smartphones, the social media explosion, youtube…) so yes, it urgently needs to be updated.

Yet, the proposal put forward by the European Commission is not even close to be focused on update the law to the Internet, the new ways of communicating and sharing information and the economical and innovative potential of the digital age. Instead, it creates unprecedented new powers for publishing giants, as well as requirements for websites to monitor and filter content upload by the users, attacking our right to access and distribute information and content on the Internet.
 

# The snipped Levy or LinkTax

Article 11 of the proposal creates a new 20 years copyright for publishers. The so-called #LinkTax would create unprecedented new monopolies for publishing giants to charge fees for snippets of text that automatically accompany hyperlinks. ¿Sounds familiar? Yes, it is like a pan-European Canon AEDE.

In Spain, we know well which can be the disastrous consequences for freedom of expression and information, innovation and the Internet ecosystem of this kind of measures. Apart from the closing of Google News and many other smaller sites, according to this report[2] issued for the Spanish Publishing Association (AEEPP) itself, the so-called canon AEDE:

“Has turned out to be detrimental for all the agents involved: the press publishers, the consumers, the online news readers, the advertisers and also the news aggregators.”

This measure harms medium and small websites and aggregators the most since they do not have the resources to afford the licensing fees or negotiate contracts with the publishers. These sites might be forced to carve out the sources they link to, to reduce costs, damaging press diversity and small publishers left out. Only major websites will be able to pay these fees and only major news sites will get linked to.

The Link Tax will also stifle innovation and ensure the dominance of entrenched players, to the detriment of smaller publishers, smaller news sites and freedom of information and expression.
 

# Content filtering or CensorshipMachine

Article 13 includes requirements for monitoring Internet users, demanding that tech companies produce filtering robots to detect the copyright status of user-generated content.

This filtering would not be done on the basis on what is legal, but on whether uploads contain content that has been “identified” by rights holders. This would overturn existing rights for quotation, parody, education and other public-interest copyright exceptions. It is censorship in the hands of copyright trolls.

Spanish citizens recently flooded social networks with indignation and the message #SinMemesNoHayDemocacia (no memes, no democracy) in response to an infamous proposal by the conservative party which threatened to remove memes under claims of honor. Well, with this automatic filtering, any meme which contains an image “identified” by a copyright holder would be blocked automatically.

It is also an economic disaster. Any website that allows user uploaded content would be forced to invest in or license expensive robot filtering software. Giants like Facebook or Google have the sources to face this task, but every other smaller website, forum, etc.c could be hold liable and would be facing legal uncertainty, or might decide to just close.
 

Watch out to defend the Internet, free culture and the rights of the users
 
Brace yourselves, days of fights and citizen lobby for our digital rights, the free circulation of knowledge and culture and freedom of expression are coming. The European Parliament, our elected representatives, has the power to overturn these atrocities and achieve a positive copyright reform, starting by the mandatory upward homogenization of all the exception in the EU.

¡Seguimos!
 

References::
[1] Full European legislation on the Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market
[2] Impacto del Nuevo Artículo 32.2 de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual

The post EU Copyright Reform: taxes, restrictions and censorship or how to cripple the Internet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The article describes a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists in Madrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives. Coming of age as Spain walked into the abyss of the economic crisis, we describe how we re-functioned our ethnographic project into a ‘prototype’. We borrow the notion of prototype from free culture activism: a socio-technical design characterised by the openness of its underlying technical and structural sources, including for example access to its code, its technical and design specifications, and documentary and archival registries. These ethnographic prototypes functioned as boundary objects and zones of infrastructural enablement that allowed us to argue with our collaborators about the city at the same time as we argued through the city. Providing a symmetrical counterpoint to the actions of free culture hackers elsewhere in the city, our anthropological prototypes were both a cultural signature of the radical praxis taking place in Madrid today and its expressive infrastructure.”

You may find the full article here.

Photo by fusion-of-horizons

The post When the Ethnographic Method Goes Open Source appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I arrived at the Transmediale festival late Friday afternoon, which was hosted as usual at Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt (The House of World Cultures) in Berlin. The area where the building is sited was destroyed during World War II, and then at the height of the Cold War, it was given as a present from the US government to the City of Berlin. As a venue for international encounters, the Congress Hall was designed as a symbol of ‘freedom’, and because of its special architectural shape the Berliners were quick to call the building “pregnant oyster” [1] The exterior was also the set for the science fiction action film Æon Flux in 2005. Both past references link well with this festival’s use of the building. I remember during my last visit, in 2010, standing outside the back of the building watching an Icebreaker cracking apart the thick ice in the river. The sound of the heavy ice in collision with the sturdy boat was loud and crisp. This sound has stayed with me so that whenever I hear a sound that is similar I’m immediately transported back to that point in time. Unfortunately, this time round there was no snow, instead the weather was wet, warm and slighty stormy.

Last year’s festival explored the marketing of big data in the age of social control. This year, the chosen format was entitled conversationpiece, with the aim of enabling a series of dialogues and participatory setups to talk about the most burning topics in post-digital culture today. To give it grounding and historical context the theme was pinned to the “backdrop of different processes of social transformation, 17th and 18th century European painters perfected the group portrait painting known as the “Conversation Piece” in which the everyday life of the aristocracy was depicted in ideal scenes of common activity.” In recent years the festival has scafolded its panels, workshops and keynotes to grand, central themes to guide its peers and visitors, along with a large-scale curated exhibition. If we view the four interconnected thematic streams- Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share and Anxious to Secure – we might guess that the festival curators are also anxious to save all the resources (and celebrations) for next year, which is after all, Transmediale’s 30th birthday.

So, I was curious to see how my brief time here would unfold…

Off-the-Cloud-Zone.

This review is focused on the hybrid event Off-the-Cloud-Zone. It featured presentations, talks and workshops, starting at 11 am, going on until 8pm. Hardcore indeed. It demanded total dedication, which unfortunately I was not able to give. However, I did offer my attention to the rest of the proceedings from lunch time until the end. It was moderated by Panayotis Antoniadis, Daphne Dragona, James Stevens and included a variety of speakers such as: Roel Roscam Abbing, Ileana Apostol, Dennis de Bel, Federico Bonelli, James Bridle, Adam Burns, Lori Emerson, Sarah T Gold, Sarah Grant, Denis Rojo aka Jaromil, George Klissiaris, Evan Light, Ilias Marmaras, Monic Meisel, Jürgen Neumann, Radovan Misovic aka Rad0, Natacha Roussel, Andreas Unteidig, Danja Vasiliev, Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud, and Stewart Ziff.

The Off-the-Cloud-Zone day event was a continuation of last year’s offline networks unite! panel and workshops. Which also originated from discussions on a mailing list called ‘off.networks’ with researchers, activists and artists working together around the idea of an offline network operating outside of the Internet. The talks concentrated on how over recent years there has been a growing scene of artists, hackers, and network practitioners, finding new ways to ask questions through their practices that offer alternatives in community networks, ad-hoc connectivity, and autonomous systems of sensing and data collecting.

Snowden Archive-in-a-Box.

Disillusionment with the Internet has spread widely since 2013, when Edward Snowden the US whistleblower leaked information on numerous global surveillance programs. Many of these programs are run by the NSA and Five Eyes with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments raising big questions about privacy and exploitation of our online (interaction) data. This concern is not only in relation to spying corporations, dodgy regimes and black hat hackers, but also our governments. “The idea of privacy has been flipped on its head. People don’t have to disclose their own information voluntarily anymore; it’s being taken from them regardless of their wishes.” [2] (Nowak 2015)

“The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.” [3] (Gellman and Soltani, 2013)

The above slide is from an NSA presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation” from its MUSCULAR program. The sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where user data resides. [4]

Snowden Archive-in-a-Box is based on the PirateBox, originally created by David Darts who made his in order to distribute teaching materials to students without the hassle of email. It is based on a RaspberryPi 2 mini-computer and the Raspbian operating system. All the software is open-source and its most basic setup can run on one RaspberryPi. In his talk Light said that a more elaborate version would use high-quality battery packs and this adds power for autonomy, along with the wifi sniffer that is running on a secondary RaspberryPi and a flat-screen for playing back IP traffic. If you’re interested building your own private, pirate Archive-in-a-Box, visit Light’s web site for instructions on how to.

Snowden Archive-in-a-Box. Cambridge University’s museum piece installation. Evan Light.

Qaul.net and Can You Hear Me?

Christoph Wachter’s and Mathias Jud’s work, directly engages with refugees and asylum seeker’s social situations, policies, and the migrant crisis. They’ve worked together on participatory community projects since 2000 and have received many awards. For instance, take a look at their digital communications tool qaul.net which is designed to counteract communication blackouts. It has been used successfully in Egypt, Burma, and Tibet, and works as an alternative to already existing government and corporate controlled communication pathways. But, it also offers vital help when large power outages occur, especially in areas in the world suffering from natural disasters. The term qaul is Arabic and means ‘opinion, say, talk or word’. Qaul is pronounced like the English word ‘call’.

It creates a redundant, open communication code where wireless-enabled computers and mobile devices can directly initiate a fresh, unrestricted and spontaneous network. This includes the enabling of Chat, twitter functions and movie streaming, independent of Internet and cellular networks. It is also accessible to a growing Open Source Community who can modify it freely.

Wachter and Jud also discussed another project of theirs called “Can You Hear Me?”, a WLAN / WiFi mesh network with can antennas installed on the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, which was located in close proximity to NSA’s Secret Spy Hub. These makeshift antennas made of tin cans were obvious and visible for all to see. The Academy of Arts joined the project building a large antenna on the rooftop, situated exactly between the listening posts of the NSA and the GCHQ to enable people to directly address surveillance staff listening in. While installing the work they were observed in detail by a helicopter encircling overhead with a camera registering each and every move they made, and on the roof of the US Embassy, security officers patrolled.

“The antennas created an open and free Wi-Fi communication network in which anyone who wanted to would be able to participate using any Wi-Fi-enabled device without any hindrance, and be able to send messages to those listening on the frequencies that were being intercepted. Text messages, voice chat, file sharing — anything could be sent anonymously. And people did communicate. Over 15,000 messages were sent.” [5] (Jud 2015)

Dowse.

And then, it was the turn of the well known team at Dyne.org to discuss a project of theirs called Dowse, which is ‘The Privacy Hub for the Internet of Things’. They said (taking turns, there was about 5 of them) that the purpose of Dowse is to perceive and affect all devices in the local, networked sphere. As we push on into the age of the Internet of Things, in our homes everything will be linked up.

As these ubiquitous computers communicate to each other even more, control over these multiple connections will be essential. We will need to know how to interact beyond the GUI interfaces and think about who has access to our private, common and public information. A whole load of extra information will be available without our consent.

Dowse was conceived in 2014 as a proof of concept white paper by Denis Rojo aka Jaromil. Early contributors to the white paper and its drafting process includes: Hellekin O. Wolf, Anatole Shaw, Juergen Neumann, Patrick R McDonald, Federico Bonelli, Julian Oliver, Henk Buursen, Tom Demeyer, Mieke van Heesewijk, Floris Kleemans and Rob van Kranenburg. I downloaded the white paper and is definitely worth reading.

The Dowse project aims to abide to the principles stated in the Critical Engineers Manifesto, (2011). Near the very end of the talk they announced to the audience an open call for artists and techies everywhere to get involved and jump into the project to see what it can do. This is a good idea. If there is no community to make or break platforms, hardware and software, then there is a limited dialogue around the possibilties of what a facility realistically might achieve. Not just that, they want artists to make art out of it. I know there are some pretty clever tech-minded geeks out there, who will in no doubt take on the challenge. However, once those who are not so literate in the medium are able to exploit the project, it will surely fly. It’s going to be interesting, because if you look at the 3rd point in the Critical Engineers Manifesto, it says “The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.” I’m thinking, that this number 3 element needs to treated with caution. If they really wish to open it up to a diverse user base, to engage with its potentialities, creatively and practically; thus, allow new forms of social emancipation to evolve as ‘freedom with others’. There needs to be an active intent to avoid a glass ceiling based on technical know-how. It’s a promising project and I intend to explore it myself and see what it can do and will invite other people within Furtherfield’s own online, networks to join in and play, break, and create.

The Sarantaporo Project.

Our final entry is the Sarantaporo Project which is situated in the North of Greece. A village in the mountains just west of Mount Olympus in Central Greece close to Thessaloniki, Macedonia and Larisa. The country has been in recession for over 6 years now, and many communities have had to create alternative ways of working with each other in order to survive the crisis. Over this troubling period, new forms of grass-roots coexistence, solidarity and innovation have evolved. The Sarantaporo Project is an impressive example of how people can come together and experiment in imaginative ways and exploit physical and digital networks.

Even before the economic crisis the region was already hit by poverty, and with the added pressures of imposed Austerity measures, life got even tougher. All the young were leaving and then migrating to the cities or abroad. Before the project in Sarantaporo, there was no Internet nor digitally connected networks for local people to use. This situation contributed to the digital divide and made it difficult to work in a contemporary society, when so many others in the world have been using technology to support their civic, academic and business for so many years already.

To resolve this issue a group of friends decided to deal with this problem by setting up a community D.I.Y wireless network to provide free internet access to 15 villages in the municipality of Elassona. “Sarantaporo.gr is an open source wireless mesh networking system that relies greatly on voluntary work both for its development and maintenance. Some volunteers are involved in the project by simply installing an antenna on their roof. Others, more actively engaged with the project, are responsible for sustaining the network by hosting meetings and answering technical questions.” [8] (Kalessi 2014) The audience was presented with snippets from a film made by the filmmaking collective Personal Cinema, about the project. It was made so the story of Sarantaporo’s DIY wireless network gets a wider reach, and that others are also inspired to do similar projects themselves.

“Besides maintaining the network in a DIWO (Do It With Others) manner, and creating an atmosphere of cooperation among far-flung communities that were previously strangers, the Sarantaporo network is incorporating different groups of people into the community, like Farmer’s Cooperatives and techies. It is also creating an intergenerational space for learning.” [9] (Bezdommy 2016)

Conclusion.

These projects are dedicated to creating socially grounded and engaged alternatives to the proprietorial, networked frameworks that currently dominate our communication behaviours. These proprietorial systems, whether they are digital or physical are untrustworthy, and control us in ways that reflect their top-down demands but not our common needs. This reflects a wider conversation about who owns our social contexts, our conversations, our fields of practice, the structures we use, the land, the cables, our history, and so on.

Looking at the state of the planet right now you’d be forgiven for betting on a future not far from the director Neill Blomkamp’s vision in the sci-fi movie Elysium where, in the year 2159, humanity is sharply divided between two classes of people: the ultra-rich whom live aboard a luxurious space station called Elysium, and the rest who live a hardscrabble existence in Earth’s ruins. However, in the Off-the-Cloud-Zone talks we encountered an ecology of strategies to protect our own indegenous cultures from the crush of neo-liberalism, we felt part of a grounded movement discovering new conversations and new methodologies that may provide some protection against future colonisation. Perhaps there is a chance, we can build and rebuild stronger relations with each other, beyond: privilege, nation, status, gender, class, race, religion, and career.

The festival this year was less structured and more nuanced than usual. It gave conversation a greater role and a deeper social context, and opened up the process for the many to connect with the ideas being explored. The whole affair seemed to be slowed down and less caught up in the hyper-macho trappings of accelerationism. It seemed less neurotic and spending less effort to impress. I’m sure, next year, on it’s 30th anniversary, all will be sharp and amazing. However, I liked this less glossy, more messy version of Transmediale and I hope it manages to impress the wrong people again, and again.

References:

[1] The Site and its History .
https://www.hkw.de/en/hkw/geschichte/ort_geschichte/ort.php

[2] Peter Nowak Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of Our Species. The Lyons Press (6 Jan. 2015). P.132.

[3] NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. Washington Post. By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani October 30, 2013. http://wapo.st/1Ty1nTX

[4] File:NSA Muscular Google Cloud.jpgs. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Muscular_Google_

[5] Mathias Jud: Art that lets you talk back to NSA spies. Subtitles and Transcript. TED.com. September 2015. http://bit.ly/1UkiMPn

[6] Peter Nowak Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of Our Species. The Lyons Press (6 Jan. 2015). P.6.

[7] “Building Communities of Commons in Greece”, Ilias Marmaras. Personal Cinema.
https://en.goteo.org/project/building-communities-of-commons

[8] Theodora Kalessi. Sarantaporo.gr: Bridging the digital divide in rural Greece. August 11, 2014
http://oipolloi.co/sarantaporo-gr-bridging-the-digital-divide-in-rural-greece/

[9] Bezdomny. Sarantaporo Residents Create Commons in Rural Greece Through a DIY Wireless Mesh Network. January 3, 2016.
http://www.shareable.net/blog/sarantaporo-residents-create-commons-in-rural-greece-through-a-diy-wireless-mesh-network

The post Transmediale 2016: Necessary Conversations Off-the-Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Click to download the pdf

Our answer

 
This is the answer we have given in an emergency meeting in the European Parliament, invited by Copyright For Creativity y junto con EDRi, Open Rights Group, organizations with which we collaborate.

 
That said, Xnet calls for a positive reform of the Copyright [see paragraph 1 below] and believes that pressing from Europe we can overcome the new intellectual property law of the Spanish government [see paragraph 2 below], possibly the most stupid law in the world.

A positive reform of the Intellectual Property Law

 
Civil society has been for years developing proposals and concrete content to replace the ossified measures and points of view of our representatives and reach a fair balance between the rights of creators and entrepreneurs and the rights of citizens to access and share knowledge, information and culture.

No more excuses. A fair reform of the Copyright, beneficial for everybody, is absolutely feasible.

Here you can see the programmatic, concrete and sustainable proposals from the civil society -> Positive Agenda.

Act in Europe to overcome the new intellectual property law of the Spanish government

 
As said, we will overcome this anachronistic law from Spain, hacking and disobeying, and from Europe, making them to declare it obsolete before it is born responding with our Positive Agenda.

A reminder of which are the main aberrations of the new Copyright Law – possibly the mot stupid law in the world. We can also win in the legislative field for international laws and treaties will help us to:

• Prevent back-steps again on levis
• Prevent the restriction of our right to copy
• Prevent excessive charges from collecting societies, their monopolies and corruption networks
• Prevent automatic self-incrimination, an aberration that denies the presumption of innocence (this is how we won against Sinde’s Law, although it reappears in the new reform)
• Defend and extend the right to quote
• Defend and extend the right of association and to earn a decent wage for the work carried out
• As confirmed by several sentences, the circulation on the Internet can not be compared with public communication [Linking is not an act of public communication; according to the ECJ, it can not be considered an infringement of copyright]

In addition, and against the looting of public educational resources by the collecting societies, we invite and support educational institutions, as a great sources of creation and knowledge, to take direct control over the knowledge created and distributed by them, to make it free and also paid equitably among all who create it without it being a business.

We are putting an end to this monopoly.
Free Internet or barbarism.
Seguimos!

 

 
EDRi analyzes and responds to SGAE’s position paper:
https://edri.org/enditorial-spanish-rightsholders-lobby-against-copyright-reform/

The post Xnet responds to the SGAE in Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Copy-me is a webseries centred on copying, it’s historical and cultural relevancy, and the myths that surround it. Intended to be released in eight episodes, the producers are running a crowdfunding campaign to make it possible. Support the campaign here and watch the video below.

The post Copy-me: A Webseries About Copying appeared first on P2P Foundation.