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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Open Culture - la Mission Civilisatrice

I've been meaning to write about the site, Open Culture, for some time now. This site, founded in 2006, is, as far as I'm concerned, THE place to go to find free cultural and educational media. Their mission is simple:
Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.

It's all here and it's all free - no gimmicks and no problems with Hadopi.  Everything on the site has been created or made available by folks who want to share.

There was some talk here in Paris this week of "civilizing the Internet."  I'd say, with sites like this one, "civilization" is a alive and well on the Internet, Mr. Sarkozy.  It just isn't in a form you and your friends like.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace 

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