aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, October 29, 2006
How about a Free Culture badge?
You may recall that the Boy Scouts of LA struck up a collaboration with the MPAA “to teach young people about respecting copyrights.”
Liz Losh, a former scout and the parent of a current cub scout, wonders “How could such a one-sided, moralistic, anti-consumer marketing effort be foisted on a bunch of earnest and community-minded kids?”
[W]e’ve made up a new patch, for a much more challenging “Free Culture” badge, to be earned by intrepid, hard working, patriotic scouts. Here are some of the requirements:
- Appear at the door of a major studio, dressed in your full scout uniform, and try to talk them into allowing educational use of historical films commonly shown in public schools (Amistad, Schindler’s List, etc.)
- Raise money with a bakesale to go across the country to CMG Worldwide in Indianapolis or Intellectual Properties Management (IPM) in Atlanta to convince these organizations to free images associated with Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King and release them into the public domain for use in school projects, such as web pages
- Paint a colorful mural on a graffiti covered wall across the street from the headquarters of the RIAA with the 9 Reasons Digital Media Products Are a Bad Deal for Consumers.
- Using your knot-disentangling skills, visit a hospital or nursing home and help the aged with their DRM-hobbled digital products
- Go to an orphanage, battered children’s home, or juvenile detention facility and show kids how to use Creative Commons resources
- Put in 100 hours of community service at your local library and see the toll that new legislation against patron privacy and public connectivity takes on your local civil servants. Then imagine what it will be like if they have to deal with RIAA and MPAA lawsuits for circulating audio and video content.
