In this series on the Constitutional Convention agenda, I will cover Global Summits. Here’s the full agenda as it stands at writing.
| Regional Orgs |
| Global Summits |
| Branded Shows |
| Stakeholder orgs |
| Articles of Incorporation |
| IRS filing status |
| Website & Logo |
| Steering Committee |
| Fundraising |
| CC CMA |
| CC Hall of Fame |
| Elections |
At first I was thinking I would leave this until after I spoke with Ryno, but I think it might be worth talking about where my thoughts are now. Maybe it will help with the Jackson 2025 event. idk.
It is worth point out that the point of these blog posts is to invite commentary, so please do get involved with ideas.
Point 0: Should we do this?
First, let’s start with a bit of a background on me. My story has been recounted on Music Manumit, Free Music Archive, and other places, but if people feel like it would be useful to have a longer version on this blog, I can do that.
For the sake of this blog, let’s say that since being introduced to Creative Commons in 2007 by the leader of the local Students for Free Culture org, I have always seen Creative Commons as a way for folks to share knowledge and culture. It is a way for an author to make it clear that they are ok with translations and sharing. So, for the sake of seeing how we got to a Global Summit it is important that Creative Commons has always been about crossing cultural boundaries to me.
But Friends of CC Music isn’t about me and maybe it doesn’t need to be about Africa and Asia either. Digital Piracy has probably always been higher in Asia for a variety of reasons but I think it is worth focus on a single reason for Asia largely being outside of the CC scene.
That reason is that the European powers have not looked to include the Asia in trade aside from to exploit. Regarding copyright specifically, the Berne Convention doesn’t even have an official translation into any variant of Chinese. Some of the reason for there not being translations is that a lot of Berne is incorporated into the WTO (which China didn’t enter until 2001!), but it’s hard to not see this is at the very best an artifact of colonialism.
For the curious, the Berne languages are French (prevailing in case of differences in interpretation) and English, officially translated in Arabic, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Numbers vary by source; for example the CIA doesn’t differentiate different versions of Arabic. I’m not a linguist so I don’t know if that makes sense, but the Berne languages don’t make any sense if you are trying to actually be a global framework for copyright:
So, copyright is steeped in colonialism. There is little doubt about that.
There are a couple of ways for Friends of CC Music to look at this historical artifact. First option is that we could say, “let’s don’t make the same mistakes as the western powers.”
Alternatively, we could say that we welcome members of those communities that turn to bandcamp and other sources to share their music but that the CC Music community largely exists in the Americas, English-speaking Oceania, and Europe and therefore that is our constituency.
Then there is the question of strategy vs core principle. We could say that, as a core principle, we are here to serve the CC Music community as it currently exists. On the other hand we could say that strategically, we are low on resources and it makes sense to focus on timezones and languages where we can have the biggest impact.
Although, that all said, as far as the Global Summits, that really just means we drop the focus on Japan. And maybe that means we drop the focus on Vancouver because part of the focus on Vancouver was to get Cheese and Pot-C involved. I have had some thoughts about Hong Kong, but these were more pipe dreams that serious plans.
Point 1: Can we do this?
I guess what it really comes down to is it seems like people can’t do this. Not that they don’t want to, but that they lack the monetary and temporal means to do so. There is an argument that we haven’t even tried yet, but we have talked to enough people that I don’t think we are going to get enough folks to make it worth the effort.
That commentary is specific to having a 2025 event. We will be adding to the website, and of course there will be 2025 Netlabel Week events that will increase the exposure and may make 2026 the time to do this. And, in any case, having a CC 25th anniversary party is a good reason to meetup. Let’s not burn everybody out with a half measure and focus on making a kickass party in 2026.
Having a Netlabel Week party in 2025 in Jackson run by Friends of CC Music USA sounds like a fine idea. I encourage folks to have Netlabel Week parties wherever they are! Ryno is in charge of Friends of CC Music USA and he has a vision for what he wants out of that event.
Point 2: Outreach
Ryno has a lot of good ideas about bringing in non-CC bands and locals that know those bands, but not CC music. That us NOT a Friends of CC Music Global Summit. It’s an outreach program.
Now, the easy question is, why not both? The reason for that is when you go to a convention you expect people at that convention to have some knowledge about the reason for the convention. That is not what will be happening. It will be a strange experience for both parties, and on top of that you are bringing people in where English is their second language (but see Point 1).
With that said, we can always recruit globally for outreach events.
Outreach is a topic to itself. I felt like I should address it here since there is a big chance the event in Jackson in 2025 is going to have an Outreach component.
Point 3: Long-term
A lot has changed since I wrote about the Global Summits being in the spring. We’ve scaled things back significantly. This mostly applies to 2025 and 2026, but having a truly global event seems like something we might not be able to do in the near term.
What then the Global Summits end up looking like will depend a lot on how we build the Steering Committee and our fundraising efforts. I would love to be in a place where we can pay for travel and lodging of the Steering Committee as well as have scholarships for folks from countries that are under-represented, but we are a long way from that right now.
Ultimately, I would like to enforce Global Summit locations having held one local event before a Global Summit. This allows a local committee/host to figure out what works and doesn’t work about venues. How much money needs to be raised, etc.
At some point we might stipulate that a venue needs to have WiFi or a sound engineer or something but we are probably a decade away from anything like that. Right now, we need to go to different places in the world and just be present to listen to what folks in the region need from a global organization.
Right now I have spoken with Yuk MC about hosting in Vancouver and Josh from Louis Lingg and the Bombs about hosting in Paris. At present, I don’t see any point in changing those plans, but we have a bunch of other stuff to deal with before we get serious about that.
Friends of Creative Commons Music 
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