This year I again attended the Creative Commons Global Summit. There were many great sessions and participants both last year and this year, but I’ve had this growing feeling I can’t shake.

My emotions were best summed up by a conversation I had with a friend just after the conference had ended. “How was your conference?” he asked. “Oh, it was good.” I replied. “Lots of Free Culture?” he asked. There was an awkward pause, “Uh… not really.” “Yeah,” he said, “Free Culture is dead. We lost.”

That’s not to say the the causes of Libraries, Museums, Open Access, Open Science, and Open Data are not good. It’s not to say the conference wasn’t full of many noble things that I support. But Free Culture is just not on anyone’s agenda.

I’ve been saying for awhile that it seems like the Free Culture community has lost leadership and momentum, that there is no rally point, no meeting place. But the truth may be that this is just the symptom of having moved on.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the Free Culture movement was always born out of a desire to access *existing* cultural resources, and not to replace them. This means that Free Culture advocates are more likely to spend effort advocating for Fair Dealing / Fair Use, exceptions to copyright, and “balance” rather than promoting Free Culture artists and works. There has also just been more success with education. No work of Free Culture (unless you stretch to include Wikipedia) has had any mainstream cultural impact. The Open Access and OER movements by contrast are changing the face of education around the world. It’s also just a function of students and others who were heavily involved maturing and losing the free time they had to spend on movement activities.

But what could it mean for Free Culture to be “dead”? According to last year’s State of the Commons report, there are on the order of 780 million Free Culture works on the Internet, and the number is growing daily. The licenses are alive and well, and while this report may over-count some things (due to user error, etc, when marking the license of a work) it seems like there is a lot of Free Culture out there. I think, however, that the movement has stalled. Free Culture is just an option in a dropdown on a hosting platform now.

Some might see this as a sign of success. At one point, no one had heard of Free Culture or Creative Commons, now many major hosting platforms offer the licenses as an option. I think it depends on what you see as the goal, and what you think of as success.

For me, right now, short-term success is getting to the point where at least one body of Free Cultural work (needs to be more than a standalone work, probably, to have staying power) achieves mainstream cultural impact. Where I could mention this body of work to someone totally unrelated to the movement and they would have at least a halfway chance of having heard of it.

Awhile ago now the main Vlogbrothers channel went CC-BY. This is certainly a body of work with a reasonable amount of success, and so is very good progress in this area.

However, my favourite to support for this remains Pepper & Carrot a born-free, community-supported webcomic by David Revoy. Revoy is a Free Culture and Free Software supported, and he really seems to understand why this sort of thing is necessary, and how to go about it. He not only embraces, but encourages and promotes all kinds of derivative works both non-commercial and commercial in nature. I think this may be a real shot to have a somewhat-well-known, ongoing franchise with only loose central management. I will continue to do what I can, and continue to remain hopeful.

If you want to connect with like-minded Free Culture enthusiasts, I recommend joining the WIFO Forum.

Most phone carriers these days have pretty poor voicemail capabilities. You have to call in to “check” your voicemail, your voicemail box can fill up, and voicemails just play in order without any good way to see what you want.

There have been some advancements in so-called “visual voicemail”, but they are not available to all of us. In this post I will show you how to set up an amazing voicemail for your Android-powered device that only requires your carrier support call forwarding (a pretty standard feature, these days). You will be able to get your voicemails instantly (or, if you don’t have cell data, whenever you have wifi), see immediately who they are from and keep them sorted by the sender, and also read a text approximation of the content so that you don’t always have to listen to it!

All services and technologies referenced in this post are Free Software or Open standards.

You’ll need a Jabber (also called XMPP) account

If you already know you have one, and know what your Jabber ID is, you can skip to the Movim login below. For everyone else, I suggest you register with Movim. Do this part from your computer (not from your phone or tablet). If you click that link, you’ll see a screen like this:

Fill it in. Your Jabber ID will be whatever username you choose, plus “@movim.eu”. Don’t forget your Jabber ID or password! Push “Create” and you’ll see a page like this:

Click the link that I have circled in red to be taken to the Movim login page, which looks like this:

Enter your full Jabber ID (username you selected followed by “@movim.eu”) and password. Congratulations, you are a part of the Jabber network!

Leave the logged-in Movim tab open while you do the next part.

Get a phone number with the voicemail service

The way this voicemail is going to work, you’re going to set call forwarding to another number. So you’ll get a number with the voicemail service that is in your local area so that the forwarding is a “local call”. The numbers cost $2.99 USD/month right now, but the first 30 days is free so you can try it without risk or handing over your credit card or anything like that.

Head to cheogram.com and you’ll see something like this:

If one of the displayed phone numbers is in your local area, you can click that. Otherwise click the “…” and you can search by area code for a local number. Write down the number you select, you will need it later. Once you have selected a number, you will see a screen like this:

Fill in your Jabber ID as shown and click “Submit” to continue. The registration process will send you a verification code as a message. So head back to your logged-in Movim tab.

If necessary, click the icon I’ve circled in red to go to the “Chats” screen. Then, select the conversation I’ve circled in blue to get your verification code. It will look like this:

That part I’ve circled in red is your verification code. Cut-and-paste that back into the registration process in the other tab, like so:

Press submit, and scroll all the way to the bottom of the next page. Here you will fill out and verify your real phone number (the one people use to call your cell phone already). We will use this later to record your voicemail greeting. The filled in page should look like this:

When you press “Submit” you will receive a phone call at the phone number you entered. A voice will read you a verification code, which you must type into the form that will look like this:

Press submit, and you’re done this part!

Set up the voicemail

Head back to your logged-in Movim tab:

If necessary, click the icon I’ve circled in red to go to your “Contacts” screen, then click the green checkmark I’ve circled in blue to allow cheogram.com to talk to you.

Then, click your newly-added Cheogram contact, which I have circled in red.

Now we want to configure the call behaviour of your new number to always go to voicemail. So select the “Configure Calls” action, which I have circled above in red.

We want it to go to voicemail right away, so set it to 0 seconds and press “Submit”.

You should see a message indicating the configuration has been saved, as above. You can just click “Close” on this message.

Your voicemail is working now, but the greeting on the mailbox will be a robot voice. Probably you want to record a greeting in your own voice, so click the “Record Voicemail Greeting” action, which I’ve circled in red above. You will receive a call on your phone, and a message will tell you to say your desired greeting at the beep. When you are done with your greeting, hang up, and it will be set automatically.

Once you’ve recorded a greeting, just press “Close” to get rid of the notice on your screen. If you want to change your greeting at any time, just select the action again.

Setting up call forwarding

Of course, you need to actually set up your phone so that your carrier will forward calls you don’t answer to the voicemail service. Every Android version is slightly different, but I’ll walk you through a generic process and it should be fairly similar on your device.

Go to your dialler app, tap the three-dots menu in the top right, and select “Settings”. This may also be under “Call Settings” in your global device settings menu.

If necessary, tap “Calls” to go into call settings.

Tap “Call forwarding” to go to forwarding-specific settings.

There are often various call forwarding settings available, set everything (except for “Always forward”, you don’t want that) to the phone number you selected from the voicemail service, which you wrote down earlier.

Getting Voicemails on the Go

Your voicemail is all set up and working now! But, probably you want to be notified of new voicemails on your cell phone, and not through the Movim web interface on your computer. So you’ll need a Jabber app for your phone. I suggest getting Conversations which you can get for a couple bucks from Google Play, Amazon Apps, or F-Droid.

When you first start Conversations, it may ask if you want to create a new account. You already have an account, so choose “Use my own provider” which I have circled in red.

You will then see a login screen, very similar to the Movim login screen. Enter your full Jabber ID (remember: your username plus “@movim.eu”) and password, then tap “Next”.

That’s it! You’re all set up to receive your amazing new voicemails directly to your Android phone!

This year I’ve been working on a new project for cultural freedom. I have adapted several freely-licensed characters and visual art for use on greeting cards. Starting with greeting cards targeting Christmas and the winter holidays generally my plan is to take orders throughout October so that cards can be printed and shipped to people in November (in plenty of time to mail them out to the intended recipients before December 25th!)

I have cards representing art from several different artists in the commons, including David Revoy’s Pepper & Carrot comic, Nina Paley’s Mimi and Eunice, Piti Yindee’s Wuffle, and the Blender Institute’s Caminandes (specifically the most recent wintery episode). This is a unique opportunity to support these artists and help Free Culture get more awareness.

Because this art is all found in the commons, I can produce these cards without needing any special contract with the original creators. No extra legal work or permission needed, I can produce these on the strength of the Creative Commons Attribution and Zero licenses of the sources. However, because I believe in supporting the work that enabled me, all revenue above expenses will be donated directly to the original creators (I’m not even keeping a cut for myself).

So hurry to get in your order, either with a greeting you like, or you can order a blank version if you prefer to write everything yourself.

Let’s say there is a proposal (like parts of TPP) to extend copyright and strangle the Public Domain for a time. This sounds bad, but let’s say it gets defeated. What are we left with? A copyright term of life + 50 years (or longer) is already strangling the progress of useful arts and culture in most of the world.

So, we lobby for a term reduction, right? Good luck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a term reduction. I’m all for many of the reforms that get proposed. I just don’t really see it happening in my lifetime. There are treaties and lobbies and too many things preventing meaningful progress in this area.

Same goes for what should be unrelated policy areas like copy protection enforcement. We can (and should!) decry expansions that criminalize legitimate security research and legitimate unlocking uses. Again, however, each victory leaves us in our existing place of defeat.

We need a back door. A way to promote art, culture, science, and innovation without climbing up the waterfall. It begins with the understanding that the length of time a work is protected for under a copyright regime is a maximum. Creators can at most any time, and for most any reason, provide the public with a license to their work under much more friendly terms than the default.

If you’re familiar with the Free Culture or Free Software or other communities, this is not news. Some creators already choose to provide the public with a license to their work. This, however, is based entirely on creators knowing about the choices available to them, understanding the advantages, and making a decision that sometimes will benefit others more than it benefits themselves.

This is where public policy can come in. Many governments already provide funding to various artistic or innovative ventures based on policy goals. If a government can be convinced of the benefits of an expanded Public Domain (say) we do not have to convince them to shorten copyright terms to achieve that goal. Much easier to implement is to use (some of) their arts funding to fund projects that will be required to (perhaps after a reasonable period of time passes, much shorter than the normal term of copyright) provide the public with a license to their work under reasonably liberal terms, and distribute without copy protection of any kind.

Instead of trying to reform the entire landscape, and instead of only hiding in our corner creating the few things we can, we carve out just a piece of policy and focus it on bettering the overall situation. Things still get much better, and with a lot less change.

Our children are the most creative component of our society. They are the great remixers. They absorb the culture that they are surrounded by, and create their own pictures and stories and songs. We hang these on our fridge, or listen, or sing along. We’re all proud of our little creators.

Children love to remix because they love to imitate. Give a child a Mickey Mouse colouring book and soon they’ll be drawing Mickey too. Watch Frozen and hear new stories about Elsa and Anna for weeks to come. We don’t give this a second thought. Surely copyright concerns are for other people, maybe teenagers making electronic music and anime music videos. Copyright need not apply here, in our children’s crayons.

Sure, I’ve not yet heard of a lawsuit being brought over a small child’s drawings, but children grow up. I’d like to talk about what happens when they do.

My sister, for instance, has grown up, gotten married, and is looking hard at what she wants to do with her life. What she enjoys most is creating visual art. So when she started taking commissions for paintings, what do you think she wanted to paint? What do you think people wanted her to paint? Disney characters, of course, the characters that she and her clients were so close to as children.

You can see examples of this everywhere. YouTube, DeviantArt, and Etsy are full of Star Wars, Star Trek, Muppets, old Disney, and various other art based on old franchises. Teens make gifs and videos, adults make paintings and scarves, everyone makes art and everyone is inspired by the culture that they absorbed as children. Those crayon drawings that no one was ever going to sue over have become hobbies and passions and, sometimes, careers. Careers that can get you in a lot of trouble.

Could these people have been kept away from strongly-protected copyrighted media as children? No. Moreover, I’m not sure one would want to even try that. When they realize, however, the problems inherent in taking inspiration from locked-up culture, it is tempting suggest they simply draw inspiration from elsewhere. There are books, movies, songs, comics, and more either in the Public Domain, or available under Creative Commons licenses. Why not look there? Well, you cannot say to an artist “Oh, just make things with this instead.” That’s not how art works. Art comes from inspiration, and inspiration is not something you can “just swap out”. The issue for these creators is not that they have seen locked-up culture, it is that they have not been exposed to creatively free culture.

So, what can we do?

Give a Child a Story They Can Create With

There are stories and images in the world that are very child-friendly and also provide the creative freedom that will be so important as their desire to create matures. Some great examples include picture books available from Brothers Whim, a cute webcomic called Pepper & Carrot which recently got a printed book funded, and several animated shorts from the Blender Institute, many featuring characters and plots suitable for children.

I am also working in this area, creating a board book for young children using some of the Blender animated characters which you can currently back in crowdfunding.

These works, and others, can be part of the culture a child absorbs while growing up, becoming part of what inspires them later in life. When they find themselves confronted by the dilemma of being inspired by art that our society forbids them to be inspired by, there is a chance they will seize upon other images from their past. Ones they may reuse and remix to their heart’s content.