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The free written word

Those who feel a special connection with the world of words can also work in free journalism. Apart from the countless number of blogs that exist, there are also various editorial sites which encourage volunteers to become contributing journalists. The main difference compared with simple blogs is that the pieces are edited and adhere to the usual press rules: truthful reporting, clear identification as a journalist when interviewing someone, correct citations, attention to sources - in short, sticking to the basic rules of journalism. These media have a very international focus and can compete with any average newspaper, at least in terms of the number of articles.

Therefore, those who wish to read or write freely can, for example, look up the Berkman Center's Global Voices project at Harvard Law School, which reports from all over the world. Special highlight: interview sequences and some quotes are given both in the respective original language and translated into English - which makes it easier for the reader to assess the political nuances of an interview.

If you like video reporting from the South Pacific you should take a look at EngageMedia. Incidentally, there is no comparable project in the EU, and neither is there an EU daily or weekly newspaper run by volunteers - which is a big shame, considering the amount of coverage Slovenian domestic politics or current cultural events in Greece receive elsewhere.

On the whole, surviving on free content is possible at least culturally nowadays - so long as a diet of bread and water is enough for you. Although there are many good ideas on the internet and more and more creative people publish under free licenses, quality and high standards often require delving a little deeper.

Culture

However, there is quite a bit of movement in the traditional licensing world as a whole. Resistance against more and more restrictive copyright rules is growing with creative people and scientists on one side, and users and consumers on the other; those who still think they are dealing with greasy-haired game crackers storing terabytes of Britney MP3s on their hard drives should think again: this growing civilian obstinacy has reached intellectual spheres like that of the UbuWeb project, where avant-garde works such as short films by Marcel Duchamps or MP3s of music by Eric Satie can be found. UbuWeb pursues a policy of publishing cultural works which are no longer available or are "absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure".

GreyLodge: absurd fringe of pop culture

A similar project targeting pop culture is Grey Lodge, which serves some strange cultural fringes and offers torrents for many movies. Here, we find treasures like David Lynch's short films from the 70s or lectures by Charles Bukowski. Illegal? Probably. Legitimate? Arguably. Alternatives? Many works and ideas are otherwise simply forgotten about or gather dust in a few libraries and media centres. This doesn't help the world, and it doesn't promote the general standard of education if half a society's culture is buried under layers of dust in a few basements.

For this among other reasons, the idea of free access is catching on with private persons and scientists, and with artists and authors. Most creative people place restrictions on the rights to change their work and/or use it commercially - however, with open source software under GPL or BSD license, this is generally allowed and even encouraged. But a text or image or piece of music does fall into a different category from a segment of C++ code, where a compiler will already prevent any overly discombobulated "improvements".

Therefore, it is quite understandable that scientists choose the [ticker:uk_110135/2 Creative Commons type] Attribution No Derivatives, which doesn't allow alterations: naturally, data or results need to remain the way they were found by the scientist. And because artists, authors and graphic designers aren't exactly among the top earners in our society they usually prefer the non-commercial type of CC license, even though - this is especially true for photos or music - derivatives are allowed.

It is remarkable how little time was needed for attitudes towards creative works to change and for free licenses to become widely popular. We should keep an eye on projects such as Magnatune (see part 1 of this series), as these endeavour to earn money with free content as fairly as possible, balancing profits between distributors and originators. If this approach succeeds it will cause the Open Access concept to become increasingly accepted in scientific circles (see part 2), and more and more hobbyists will pass on their knowledge and skills freely. This should produce new creative ways of earning money during the next ten years. (odi)

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