Welcome and keynote by Tony Sebro at CopyleftConf 2020: transcript

Key points

• The hosts, who work at the Software Freedom Conservancy, announce the code of conduct, sponsors, lunch, Wi-Fi and a closing time of 4:30.
• They say the conference deliberately invites speakers whose views on copyleft they disagree with, as long as discussion stays respectful.
• Sebro says he sees knowledge as a foundation of freedom, and traces his career from protecting clients' exclusive knowledge to helping share it.
• He warns that passionate communities can invest in edge topics at the expense of core principles, which makes them hard for newcomers to enter.
• He describes Turkey's two-and-a-half-year block of Wikipedia and talks with African contributors, whose main concerns were access costs and infrastructure rather than copyright.
• He calls copyleft a strategy rather than a moral philosophy and asks how those who extract value from projects can be encouraged to reinvest in them.

Chapters

1. 0:00Welcome and opening remarks
2. 1:11Sponsors, bathrooms and code of conduct
3. 4:27Lunch, social media and Wi-Fi details
4. 6:56Introducing keynote speaker Tony Sebro
5. 8:36Prophecy and hip-hop: a path to free software
6. 12:48From patent litigation to free culture
7. 14:05Copyleft, onboarding and core principles
8. 15:55Wikipedia blocked in Turkey and views from Africa
9. 18:34Copyleft as strategy and reinvestment

Full transcript

0:00Good morning, everybody, and thank you for coming to the second annual Copyleft Conf. Didn't we start numbering at zero? Sorry? Why didn't we start numbering at zero, why is this second? You should have thought of that a year ago. I'm Karen Sandler. I'm Bradley Kuhn. We work at the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is a non-profit charity set up to do everything around free and open source software that is related to the public good.

0:31we focus on things like fiscal sponsorship and we defend the GPL and we run a diversity initiative called Outreachy. And we are pleased to host Copy Left Conf. I have to tell you on a personal level that last year I was so excited for the first annual Copy Left Conf that I did not sleep at all the night before. And you know what happened? I couldn't go to sleep last night either because I was so excited. So we have a few announcements and housekeeping that we'll do before we get started with our great program.

1:11First, I want to let you know that there is a gender-neutral bathroom. Do you know where it is? Yes, so there's binary bathrooms on all floors, and the gender-neutral one is if you go out to this foyer here and go all the way to the end and back, it's basically the other side of that wall, but you can't get to it from that side. And there are binary bathrooms on all the other floors as well. And you can tell because it has an accessible bathroom sign on it. I very much want to thank our sponsors, our platinum level sponsors, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and our silver sponsor, Wolfram Sang, who is an individual who stepped up to the sponsorship level in large part because, you know, we're super excited to have individuals who care enough about copyleft that they would do that.

2:02Yeah, and we made choices about how we set the levels so that it was possible for an individual to sponsor as well and we encourage other individuals to do it. There is a benefit that Wolfram is not taking advantage of. You get a reserved seat. Here is Wolfram's reserved seat but he's such a community folk that he's sitting a few rows back instead. And let's give all of our sponsors a round of applause. Sponsorship helps a lot. So, let's get that. Thank you. More housekeeping.

2:37We have a code of conduct. This is extremely important to us. If you have any concerns or questions about it, please read it. It's on our website. Any questions? Deb Nicholson. Deb, are you in the room? Are you running around? She is probably organizing something. And Brett Smith are the people you should ask. If you're not sure who they are or just want to talk to me, that's okay, too. and uh and we believe deeply in the code of conduct and that means you need to be very respectful in discussions we expect contentious discussions today but you should always be respectful of other parties and their and their views uh and state your disagreements with kindness uh and and interest uh for collaboration we believe very strongly in the idea that uh conferences and venues that discuss important issues should be open to people who hold views on the issues that we may not agree with we put a tremendous i was part of the lucky enough to be part of the

3:37program committee we put a tremendous amount of work to reach out and invite speakers who have views about copyleft that certainly i personally really really disagree with but we feel that it's important for us to have dialogue there are people who are excited about copyleft and interested in it to do things with it that us traditional copyleft folks Are uncomfortable about, to say the least. But we want those people here and we want engagement about them. But please make that engagement respectful, friendly and collaborative. Yes, passionate is very, very welcome. Mean spirited, no thanks. There will be a casual reception afterwards at Maison de Peuple and that information is on our website. We will have a prompt end at 430. I am so excited that all of you are here.

4:27of you were able to make it a priority so early in the morning after FOSDEM to be here so we're gonna try to have some more relaxed conversation at the end of the day oh and before we get to the end of the day we should explain briefly lunch right the lunch situation okay okay I hope you knew more about than I did lunch is is here yes in this room and there are tables and I'm looking forward to it and there should be if you made a dietary request that should be accommodated if you see a problem with your dietary requests being not served talk to Deb and she'll get the venue to sort it out for you if you need to store your bag that we have a place for that It's around the corner and upstairs where the homebrew meeting is.

5:22And if you are using social media, you can use copyleftconf as your hashtag. I don't do social media. So that there is a lot of great discussion and we involve people who aren't here. Thank you. Wi-Fi? Ah, yes, there is Wi-Fi and the information, does anybody, does anybody? Yeah, it's out on the counter sort of by where the drinks are. So, and I don't, I haven't got on it yet, so I don't know what it is to read off.

5:52Raise your hand if you can say it out loud into the mic. So, the Wi-Fi is the one, the Trico Private 100, and if I recall correctly, the password is Trico 100, lowercase, all in one word. It's, okay, Trico Private 100, and it was, the password was, is the first word Trico, T-R-I-C-O, 100, all in one, no spaces.

6:25Okay, I think that's it for housekeeping announcements, I'm incredibly excited about today's schedule. Deb has another housekeeping announcement. Yes, so that's Deb, so if you have a question or comment about the code of conduct, Deb is your person, or Brett, that's right. And we also send people to you if they have trouble finding dietary needs to sort out if something goes wrong with that.

6:56Yep, and me or Deb are great people to ask over the course of the day if you have any questions. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our keynoter. Why don't you step over here? I'll step over here, okay. I could not be more thrilled to introduce today's keynoter. Some of you may know Tony Sebro, who is a longtime member of our community. He used to be Software Freedom Conservancy's general counsel, and we sadly yet joyfully said goodbye to him to send him to Wikimedia, where he is the deputy general counsel.

7:37I hear snapping for Wikimedia Foundation, which is pretty exciting. you know it's funny you know normally when you do an introduction for someone you look up their bio you make sure you can pronounce their name you try to learn one really positive thing about them so that you can promote them but I can say that working with Tony was exceptional his thoughts on copy left and on digital freedom in general are of great interest I am thrilled to see him on the stage let's give a hand for Tony Seabro Thank you, Karen and Bradley, and also to the other folks on the program committee for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here. This is a cool space. This creates a nice vibe for the event. So thank you for setting that up.

8:36Are we four? We got slides yet? All right. I'm humbled to be talking to an audience of folks who are really dedicated to advancing conversations around free software and free culture and free expression. So a bit about me, last week the good folks at Conservancy tweeted this tweet about my talk to sort of advertise that I was coming. In the quick bio, they described me as a lawyer at Wikimedia, a free software activist, and on the board of Outreachy. And it was that second phrase that kind of stuck out at me because I never really thought of myself as a free software activist, right? Free software pragmatist, yeah, maybe I could take that, but activist, it carries so much more weight right so I had a friend in college who printed up

9:36business cards that said Simon Montrose political activist in his phone number But I think he only handed him out at parties. I think it was just sort of his opening salvo, worth anything else. I'm not sure what actual activism he was engaged in. But, you know, upon reflection, that tweet actually caused me to change my talk a little bit. Because I thought about the through line over the course of my career from adolescence, actually, that connects me to this wonderful movement.

10:08So I grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., about north of Washington, D.C. And in high school, I was into, really into two things that have a surprising bit of overlap. 19th century eschatology, the study of prophecies about the end of the world, and golden era hip-hop. So I was raised, and still am a Seventh-day Adventist, I was raised in a faith tradition that focuses quite a bit on biblical prophecy.

10:38This is a flyer that was used in the 18th century that describes a bunch of different things going on in ancient prophecy. And they were advancing new theories of prophetic interpretation at the time. I attended a parochial high school, and the curriculum included a Bible class. That, in part, dealt in the prophecy. And I was here for it. I loved reading about it. I loved trying to unpack it and understand it. And I seriously considered, you see this statue in the upper left corner. That's of a dream by King Nebuchadnezzar. And I seriously considered painting that as a mural in my bedroom. I sketched it out. And I never got around to actually printing it, to actually painting it. And then it came to hip hop.

11:26I enjoyed some of the party centric stuff that you know was crossing over the time but and I really wasn't much of the hardcore stuff but the stuff that really excited me was this there was this sort of politically conscious stream in late 80s early 90s hip-hop that it was kind of a blend of amateur philosophy and some some Marxist leftist revolutionary themes and and the teachings of various religious sects and you ended up with what we might call today sort of woke hip-hop And a lot of the artists of that era that fancied themselves politically minded or Afrocentric were influenced by the 5% nation, which isn't well known now, but sort of this quasi-religious sect that was coming out of New York.

12:09And it wasn't so much what they said or what they taught, didn't really align with my worldview, but I loved how they said it. It was the slang that they used that really shaped, you know, how I, you know, that's what attracts me to the music. And so, they wouldn't explain something, they would drop signs. If you were in a group, you were in a cipher. And if you were clueless, they might say, you don't know your math. And, you know, I was a STEM geek at the time, and this was manna from heaven. So, the overlap between eschatology and this subculture was this, there was a romanticized knowledge.

12:48The unlocking of mysteries, the revelation of the previously unknown. And it promoted the discovery of knowledge, the value of knowledge, especially knowledge that otherwise wasn't widely available. Knowledge as a key to social justice. you know knowledge as that provides people with the leverage to overcome oppression knowledge is a foundational right that promotes freedom and as I look back over my career I started out I can trace a through line sort of a progression from assisting clients with the protection of their exclusive knowledge to facilitating the broad distribution of it I started out as a patent litigator, and a lot of the clients I would present were medical device companies.

13:35They were preventing other medical device companies from using their inventions. I then moved into patent licensing, which helped companies share their knowledge with each other for the right terms and the right conditions, of course. And I'm not saying this to say that I view that work as immoral or counterproductive, But for the past eight years, during my time at Conservancy, and now with Wikimedia, I've worked alongside colleagues who work tirelessly to advance and support free software and free culture, including copylefted projects.

14:05And what's so great about this is there's this shared sense of commitment, of citizenship. Copyleft is a tool that allows contributors to opt in so that we can all reap the benefits of willingly and intentionally joining this cooperative. it. Copyleft is a mechanism that helps ensure that the public, not just a select few, receives access to tools and code and cultural works and knowledge in the name of freedom. Now, I admit there are times when I worry that our conversations to advance our understanding of copyleft and the mechanics of how copyleft can support our cooperative can be too insular.

14:42Our communities have a ways to go to improve how we onboard newcomers. And that goes for new entrances into the policy discussion space, as well as for newbie floss developers and Wikipedia editors. I myself, an erstwhile patent attorney transitioning from the private sector, encountered some culture shock myself when I first entered the space. And I'm not just talking about the flaws our communities have when it comes to dealing with diversity and intersectionality. I'm also talking about the tendency that all passionate communities have to invest in features on the edge at the expense of replenishing what's happening at the core.

15:20It's understandable. You know, all movements advance and evolve, and once people coalesce around and codify a set of shared principles, it's natural to continue discussing new permutations and pushing the proverbial envelope. But without reinvestment in those core principles, those edge conversations can feel inaccessible from the outside. Now members of my faith tradition debate whether decades of investing in discussions around prophecy have resulted in the neglect of the expression of core principles relevant to a new generation.

15:55And in hip-hop, the artists who focused on acrocentric mysteries found themselves on the periphery of an increasingly popular and commercialized genre that co-opted their form but not their substance. And in both instances, these intra-community debates have been difficult. They've been accompanied by questions of ownership and leadership, and there were pointed accusations of selling out and pointed accusations of obsolescence. What has contextualized this debate for me is the situation that we at Wikimedia were facing in Turkey. As you may have heard, the Turkish government had blocked Wikipedia in Turkey for two and a half years. They just unblocked Turkey last month and when I joined the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2018 we were all in heavily invested in finding ways to encourage the Turkish government to return access to their citizens the government didn't base their action on some novel or controversial interpretation of CC by essay just political force or just you know and the result was that for two and

16:58a half years over 80 million people were denied access to the free knowledge and free culture that the Wikimedia community had wanted them to both receive and contribute to. I'm thankful for the concerted effort of allies and partners in the digital rights and free expression space who came to our community's defense, raised awareness, and advocated for our shared world vision. This past November, I spoke at Wiki and Daba, a regional conference organized for and by Wikimedia volunteers and contributors on the African continent.

17:30I spent a few days in Abuja, Nigeria, talking to contributors from all over the continent about the public policy issues they were most concerned about. And there were certainly some who cited issues with copyright. There were certainly some who wanted to talk about freedom of panorama, but they were in the minority. One contributor just said that the cost of access is just too high and it's crippling their efforts. Another complained about the electrical grid, and so on. These challenges can't directly be solved by copyleft, but they do threaten the efficacy of copylefted projects in that region. In a recent blog post, Bradley, stated that copyleft itself is not a moral philosophy rather copyleft is a strategy it's a strategy that has allowed communities to build and share the software and to create the cultural works and to create and to curate the knowledge all with an explicit dedication to the freedom that access to access those works can enable sorry an explicit dedication to the freedom

18:34that access to those works can enable and we can certainly celebrate the success of that strategy as evidenced by the ubiquity of these projects that have been developed using that strategy. But we can also consider what else we as communities can do to facilitate the freedoms our works are intended to provide. Not just the four specific tenets that define free software and free culture, but to revisit the moral philosophy Centered around a broader understanding of empowerment that free software and free culture provides.

19:06That discussion of core principles can also challenge us to think more expansively about the commitments we collectively make and encourage others to make to the sustainability of copyrighted projects. Just a few weeks ago in Davos, billionaires and titans of industry were discussing what they called stakeholder capitalism. and how to broaden the traditional definition of corporate stakeholder to be more inclusive than just the financial stakeholders. So how do we expand the traditional definition of share and share alike to encourage those who extract value from our projects to reinvest and not just in the form that the projects themselves are comprised?

19:42When platforms co-op Wikipedia articles to buttress the reliability of their content in the face of disinformation, we can and should and have asked those platforms to reinvest in wikipedia in ways that go beyond contributing to the articles themselves but to make that case we have to we have to invest in refining and iterating on how we describe the value proposition our cognitive projects represent for the public with that i look forward to today's sessions Thanks again to the organizers for inviting me. I know I'm now happy to cede the floor to the true activists who are dedicating their smarts and bandwidth to refining the wonderful tool that we use to define and protect our community's work. And as we engage in various expert-level conversations about copyleft, I really want to encourage and call all of us to keep in mind our shared commitment, not just to the strategy, but to the objective that we want to use copyleft to help us achieve. Thanks.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Welcome and Keynote by Tony Sebro – CopyleftConf 2020.webm by Software Freedom Conservancy (2020-02-03), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.