O'Reilly Network: Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig
I was at the World Social Forum, but much of what was going on at the World Social Forum was related to Brazil's leadership in spreading free software and free culture. So the free software movement has exploded in Brazil, led in part by the government, which is increasingly using free software in its own work and requiring it for much of the government's coding work. The free culture movement is being pushed in Brazil largely because of the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, who envisions a future where an increasingly large proportion of the content in Brazil is made available to the world via Creative Commons licenses.
Now the strategy in both cases is to increase wealth in Brazil. The view of free software is that it's far better for Brazil if the technology industry is trained in the skills needed to build and modify and extend free software than if they're trained in the skills of how to implement a patch for the latest Windows virus. That's about technology self-sufficiency.
And in the free culture context, Brazil is eager to have their music spread broadly to increase the demand for Brazilian musicians. They have a project to create a huge archive of Brazilian music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which will encourage people to get access to it and share it for noncommercial purposes and remix it.
It's perhaps the most exciting place in the world right now for these issues. They're extremely well-educated and committed people there. And the movement is fundamentally political. It's a mix of all kinds of people from Brazil--I mean, particularly young, but all sorts of young people. Men and women, people who have a technical background, people who don't--all of whom are demanding a cultural and technological future for Brazil that is not dependent on someone else. That's the essential feature in both the software and culture contexts. They want a future where they're not dependent on Microsoft and a future in which they're not dependent on rich copyright holders in the United States.
