The speakers were all pretty interesting, but nothing beat Larry Lessig's presentation. He mentions what software he uses for presentations on his blog, it looked amazing. The actual content was great too, with lots of examples of remixed content, from AMV's to George Bush and Tony Blair singing to each other. His discussion of a cultural commons and the problems with 'normal' copyright sparked my imagination. It made me realise what I had conjectured for a while, CC is open source for everything else. CC are even developing great collaboration tools (like diff and patch) for music. I am listening to the WIRED CD right now. As an interesting side note, Lessig sounded like a beat poet when he spoke.

In a brief discussion with Lessig later in the evening (we got to meet Lessig, woo hoo!) he said that he had asked someone to draw a map of the software tools available to enable this collaboration and that there were several holes, creative flash for example. Darb was there and we mentioned the idea of programming bounties, similar to the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Creative Commons SA was made possible and carried out by Heather Ford. She seems to have worked her butt off to get it going. An idea struck me while chatting, the idea of creating a cultural commons in Africa ties in quite nicely with the concept of ubuntu (not the linux distribution). My friend Jason is writing a philosophy thesis on this so he can correct my understanding, but ubuntu is an African communitarian principle that translates very roughly to "I am because we are". Heather said she had been using the concept of ubuntu in all of her papers. So it seems like Africa is primed for the creative commons. This is true also for the rest of the world, as Lessig pointed out in his presentation, the creative commons is us taking copyright back to what it used to be: the idea of overextended intellectual property rights is only a recent development in human history.

There were quite a few other interesting discussions but I don't want to ramble on too much. I am hoping to get a few people down to Rhodes for some public lectures, namely Chris Bester to provide some insight into the legal side (and the Laugh it Off case) and Heather Ford for a public lecture on the Creative Commons. I also hope to do a presentation to my computer science department on various licenses (e.g. GPL for code and CC for text). Anyway, I need to get up early for the actual conference day one tomorrow.

UPDATE: I meant to mention that Darb had some of his photos on display (unbeknownst to him), full colour and big with his bio underneath. He also got a special thank you, nice one Darb.