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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux.html?tw=wn_tophead_5We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin
We pledge allegiance to the penguin, and the intellectual property regime for which he stands. One nation, under Linux, with free music and open source software for all. Welcome to Brazil!
By Julian Dibbell
Late one tropical evening last year, a small delegation of American online-rights activists and scholars - including Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, Harvard's William Fisher, and John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - sat in the living room of a beachfront Rio de Janeiro penthouse, preaching the virtues of Internet-powered cultural sharing to Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture. The minister himself, Gilberto Gil, sat on the floor, cross-legged and barefoot, cradling an acoustic guitar in his lap. In addition to being one of Brazil's most high-profile politicians, Gil is also one of its biggest pop stars, with almost four decades of classic back catalog to his name. It was unclear, therefore, just how Gil would respond to the Americans' pitch: an online music archive that might one day contain every Brazilian song ever recorded, all downloadable for free. When they finished laying out the ambitious plan, there was silence. Gil strummed a contemplative chord or two, and then, as Lessig and Fisher eyed each other in polite bafflement, the minister launched into a five-minute, unplugged performance of the bossa nova standard "Formosa." Free of charge.
As it turned out, Gil was happy to give the project his backing. A few months later, he agreed to lend the government's imprimatur to a new digital-sampling license designed by Creative Commons, the US nonprofit founded by Lessig to explore alternatives to the increasingly restrictive terms of copyright. What's more, Gil had also agreed to put his intellectual property where his mouth was. He was going to rerelease a handful of his own classic hits under the new license, free for anyone to slice, dice, and spice up their creations with, a few seconds at a time.
None of which should really come as a surprise. For one thing, Gil is no more typical a pop star than he is a politician. Sixty-two years old, he wears shoulder-length dreadlocks and is apt to show up at his ministerial offices dressed in the simple white linens that identify him as a follower of the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé. Slouching in and out of the elegant Barcelona chairs that furnish his office, taking the occasional sip from a cup of pinkish herbal tea, he looks - and talks - less like an elder statesman than like the posthippie, multiculturalist, Taoist intellectual he is. And when he turns to the First World's increasingly powerful intellectual-property establishment, he sounds more like a Slashdot hothead than like the well-compensated content baron he also is.
For Gil, "the fundamentalists of absolute property control" - corporations and governments alike - stand in the way of the digital world's promises of cultural democracy and even economic growth. They promise instead a society where every piece of information can be locked up tight, every use of information (fair or not) must be authorized, and every consumer of information is a pay-per-use tenant farmer, begging the master's leave to so much as access his own hard drive. But Gil has no doubt that the fundamentalists will fail. "A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property," he says. "No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world - and there's no use resisting it."
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