Brazilian Indies Protest Exclusion, CC-M$FT Partnership

Local reaction: iCommons was a palhaçada … i.e., a farce

SÂO PAULO — I have been meaning to follow up on local reactions to the iCommons rollout in Rio de Janeiro, and this report on the event from a local point of view from Brazilian Indymedia, the Center for Independent Media, has also been in my translation queue for quite some time.

The most curious fact to me was that Microsoft, which had battled tooth and nail, and continues to battle, the Brazilian government’s decision to replace Windows with Linux on tens of thousands of desktops and servers in 2003, is now tight with the MiniC, as the Brazilians call the Ministry of Culture, which promoted the CC event alongside the Fundação Getúlio Vargas — a notorious cultural, economic and educational monopoly and political actor of dubious integrity.

I also noticed that the government’s commitment to release its own internal software development projects under a CC-GPL license has only produced one piece of software so far: an adaption of the Tiki wiki software.

Much talk, little social production.

So here are highlights from the report from one of the founders of the wonderful Estúdio Livre: Microsoft’s participation was not on the official agenda and was kept secret until the day of the event. Six Brazilian conference-goers wore red clown noses — a gesture that will be familiar to fans of Os Mutantes — in protest.

Participation by Brazilian applicants was severely limited, and critics of the project, and of Microsoft, were not afforded invitations. A number of Brazilian participants were cancelled at the last minute without a satisfactory explanation. All of the workshops were in English.

The choice of venue — a deluxe hotel in a tourist zone — was in stark contrast to the situation of free culture in Brazil.

And much, much more.

The highly expansive conference report may require a second post to cover all the relevant observations.

The first day of the isummit was really bizarre. Among the crystal chandeliers of the second most expensive hotel in Rio de Janeiro, The Praia da Copacabana, four meals a day, open bar, there at the table was gilberto gil, ronaldo lemos (of the FGV, which localized the CC for Brazilian legislation), Lawrence Lessig (current “chairman” of the NGO, yes, creative commons is an NGO), paulina urrutia (Culture Minister from Chile) and Joi Ito (”chairman” of icommons, the NGO formed to do events like this –that’s right, another NGO!..). G.’s talk and videos. gil’s is 30 min. are available here.

right after the spech (which created a literary mood befitting a true Rastaman, exploring the local vs. the global, his travels around the world and his return [here from the perspective of there, and vice versa], the tragic and celebratory encopunter with the world outside Brazil, and with oneself, he even used that cliche about “we are all alike in our immense difference”), intoxicating even Lemos: “Wow, I totally lost myself”.

This is no time to be getting lost.

[...]

The first day of the isummit was just this workshop by tactical tech, in which we laid out some concepts, programs and ideas for the new edition of their “box”, open publishing, in the next wiki.

The Model Participant

There were maybe ten of us. I took part in the section on participatory media, alê, cris and pixel did software and maga did access to knowledge.

What we observed is that the public focus of those people, along with much of the language they used, was imposed from the top down.

this was very clear in the diagram that heather ford (icommons) did of her typical user: A journalist, a musician as a hobby, with a superfast connection at home, and of course, a man.

alê immediately produced a user profile more in conformity with our reality: a girl who uses a community telecenter located in a favela and wants to develop a project for her community, such as a ‘zine, and plays in a community carnaval drum corps.

Well, almost everything they wanted to do I believe we are already doing, because that is the whole point of the Free Studio, while I think this box of theirs is going to take a long time to come to fruition. What they need is an active community of developers, essential in a project that works with toiols that are free, and therefore dynamic. In this workshop we met this supernice girl (the only other woman besides me and maga, since heather is from the organization and doesn’t count) from boston, named elizabeth stark.

Next came the workshops on themes like: Disputes, Collecting Societies, International Affiliates Relations, Policy Workshop, CC @ WIPO and FTA, Clinics, CC 3.0 e Create!

English Only

Okay, so, after the criticism of the choice of venue, my other criticism is that almost the whole thing was in English. It is worth pointing out that even projects on translation, localization and access to knowledge were presented in English only.

The MSFT Stealth Announcement

Next came the workshops on themes like: Disputes, Collecting Societies, International Affiliates Relations, Policy Workshop, CC @ WIPO and FTA, Clinis, CC 3.0 e Create!

Okay, so, after the criticism of the choice of venue, my other criticism is that almost the whole thing was in English. It is worth pointing out that event projects on translation, localization and access to knowledge were presented in English only..

I went to the Create! workshop Where alê (freire) presented the new version of Free Studio and where Micro$oft snuck in to do a presentation on its collaboration with CC. I found out later that this is actually a common practice of big companies — they just show up, without being on the official program, just to avoid the inevitiable criticisms. Read more on this here. That’s just how Micro$oft infiltrated the FISL, and they did it again at iSummit. alê e caio mariano, who were at the same table, only found out the day before.

We had with us 6 clown noses that we took out after all the presentation , during the talk by the representative of the megacompany, which is integrating a new plug-in for CC licensing in its text editor. In the midst of the applause [for the talk] we heard a few boos. When I got home I found this article on the Ministry of Culture site which not only knew of but approved the partnership between CC and Micro$oft, which was also blessed by Lessig …

I heard that François Déchelle of CCFrance was also pissed off by the partnership and that they might approach Open Office for a similar partnership.

The reason for our protest was as much to criticize M$FT as it was to protest the alliance with the Creative Commons.

When we talk about free culture, we are talking about a new way of producing and sharing knowledge, not just “content.” And this is totally contrary to the corporate model of this corporation from our neighbor to the north, which preaches a per-user model for communications tools, taking nearly $1 billion a year from the public coffers of a country like Brazil, just for a user’s license, that’s right, just a temporary permission for me to use a given piece of software for a year. (Brief comparison: according to a study by the PSL-BA this is the entire budget of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Imagine if all that money were invested in the development of Free Software” That’s already happening in a voluntary way …)

Even more important, as Maga says, these are essentially political deals, and bear on the future of this specific construct called Free Culture, but as in the history of many social movements and struggles for freedom, this phenomenon goes by many names, such as independent media, tactical media, free software, human rights, etc, so it seemed to me that the bizarre atmosphere on Copacabana Beach was getting more and more ominous and toxic …

Exclusion

My participation in the iSummit came about in a rather strange way. felipe ff fonseca (metareciclagem) had signed up for the event, but his application was turned down, as were those of people from a number of projects I work with, such as alê, djahjah and caetano from pontos de cultura. The justification was that the number of participants had to be limited. I sincerely did not even care to sign up.. Nevertheless, about a month before the event, I got an e-mail from ff in response to a question from stephanie of tactical tech , an international organization that was going to do a workshop parallel to the iCommons event, who complained of the lack of women among the participants. tactical tech was going to launch the latest version of its NGO in a box.

So it was through an invitation from stephanie via ff to this event, which would precede the main event, that I managed to get into the iSummit. All of sudden, I got an e-mail with my airline ticket, lodgings and an invitation to the summit itself, even though I had told them several times I did not need lodgings, since my mom lives in Rio de Janeiro). I nominated magaly and tori to attend the event with me, because they are women and are from Rio de Janeiro. Maga also responded right away, and so the doors of the summit opened wide for us — but only after foreign intervention, it is worth emphasizing!

Before the event, it was criticized on several of the mailing lists for CC-licenced projects because of the the limit on participation by Brazilians.

Hernani Dimantas: “This Icommons in Brasil means the copyrightization of copyleft by a small group from the Ministry of Culture and the CC’s satellite groups. I find it outrageous that they would exclude from the debate people, like me, who disagree with them. Sincerely, patriotism aside, I have no idea where this opportunistic project is going.

Some participants even had their participation cancelled, as was the case with Jorge Machado [who sent the following letter]:

“Much to our regret, we recently have been informed that the ICommons Summit has adopted a policy of restricted participation.

“Only two weeks before the event some of the interested Brazilian participants were informed individually about the impracticality of their participation. The argument stated by the organizational board was that the event was designed for 200 participants. We understand that this event, as any other, has physical limitations, but we do not agree that the solution to this is the selection of the participants. The organizational board invited people who they considered “important”, excluding creators, students, artists, researchers and members of the civil society. Even considering that Rio de Janeiro is a city that has hundreds of options for hosting big events, the organizational board has not started a dialogue about the “problem” – which is a peculiar practice for an event that aims to overcome the obstacles to free access to culture –and has decided to exclude an important part of the Brazilian community.

This surprising attitude substantially opposes the spirit of openness and integration, and the exclusion of the Brazilian community that supports the adoption of free licenses is especially objectionable.

Therefore, we have come out publicly to protest the elitist character assumed by the event and hope that someday in the future the organization will put into practice what they stand for in theory.

Welcome to the Zona Sul — the Potemkin Village par excellence. More of this report as I have time to translate.