Free Software
                         Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
                                August 13, 2007
Contents                                                              1 Introduction                                                          2
2 Hackers and the Protestant ethics                        2
2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) .    5
2.2 Against memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .   7
3 Free Software, politics and ideology . .. . . . . . . .  8
3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy . . . .    11
4 Revolutionary justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5 Hacking the regime of equal rights . . . . . . . . . .  17
6 Free Software and academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
7Conclusions                                                       20

Challenges to traditional copyright resulting from peer-to-peer applications, free software, filesharing and appropriation art have caused a wide ranging debate on the future of copyright. Dmytri Kleiner brings existing critiques of material property from the left to bear upon the realm of copyleft artistic production and asks how, within the existing copyright regime, can artists earn a living?

As the scarcity essential to the cultural commodity is undermined by digital abundance and social networking, social relations and the unique ‘live’ performance are all that's left to sell. Mass market music increasingly resembles relational art with its dream of waking the ‘zombies’ of consumer culture, but are the citizens of Web 2.0 society born again or undead? Paul Helliwell shuffles through the mall

The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users,  ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production

Since the Web 2.0 tornadoes have all but touched down in London, OpenMute along with a number of partners thought it was a good time to set up a social event which looked at new technical developments and projects as well as contemplating the Network Effect more generally.

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/artsdebate/

The Arts Council has got a blog on... As part of the 'first ever public value enquiry' into the arts, ACE is creating an elaborate set of feedback mechanisms, one of which is a website discussion currently well underway at Artscouncil.org.uk. Nothing is yet visible of the focus groups, meetings and one-to-one interviews that are also promised in this £500,000 enquiry, but the website augurs interesting times ahead. To respond to an apparently widely felt dissatisfaction with ACE's existing 'tick box' style indices (deemed, one imagines, to be crude and demeaning of art's higher functions), this process has ostensibly been initiated to shape what Chief Exec Peter Hewitt describes as 'a more contemporary notion of accountability in the publicly funded arts sector, one that is meaningful to the Arts Council’s own ambitions, to the individuals and organisations we fund and to wider society.'

This article, could do with a littlemore detail e.g. who, or what this organisation called FAST
[http://www.fast.org.uk/UK] is? Also to what extent the court order to 'unmask file-sharers'
was opposed or could be challenged by the internet providers mentioned. I think the tone of
inevitability in announcing this action as the 'first wave' of a supposedly unstoppable process,
when this is still quite far off from a successful prosecution is pretty self-defeating and what does
this mean for the ISPs who wants to sign up with an ISP that is going to hand over personal details
and browsing history