Hacking Democracy

Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington?

But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, if you can't fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it.

But you've done nothing.

We're just at the moment when people realize that culture is not something that has to be fed to them, like the Soviet citizens at the end of the Soviet empire, where they realize that they can participate in the construction and sharing of culture. Technology has given us that opportunity. And the problem now is that the law takes that away. And so Creative Commons' objective is to find a way to get the law out of the way, so this extraordinary potential for human creativity can be realized in the context of this technology....What we want to do is make it easy for people to recognize the free culture that is out there for them to build upon, so that they'll build on that culture.

There is an important difference between the free software movement and the open-source software movement, in that the free software movement's first goal is freedom. It's not promising better software. It's not promising a better business model. It's promising freedom. And I think that's what the free culture movement is about. It's about giving people the freedom to build and cultivate their culture.

Free culture is about the transformation between a broadcast culture and a procreative culture—from a broadcast culture where the few speak to the many to a procreative culture where the many speak to the many. That's what the Internet is supposed to have been about forever. But blogging is the first time that it happens in the context of political ideas that get translated and expanded upon as other people comment on them. In the context of political campaigns...they become better citizens. They become engaged citizens. There has been no new technology in the last 150 years that has produced more engaged citizens.

This was not a dot-com crash. The Howard Dean campaign was a dot-com miracle. Let's look at this thing. This guy starts...on January 31 of last year with seven people, $157,000 in the bank, 432 known supporters nationwide....He was an asterisk....How did it happen? It is a miracle that Howard Dean moved from there to $45 million, more money than any Democrat in history has raised....He didn't do it. I didn't do it. You did it.

It took about five to ten years to realize that was the moment when television was going to change everything in America's politics. What no one could've predicted was that it would have become a race for money, a race to buy a one-way communications tool that would take the American people essentially out of the process. It was no longer about average Americans, it was about, “How do I find a rich guy to write me a $2,000 check and then how do I take that money and buy television with it?”