Given the current mainstream media explosion of coverage about piracy in Somalia, let me see if get your attention by sneaking in an alternative story about pirates on the web. Here’s the scoop: This Saturday, April 18, I’ll be meeting with a group of programmers, bloggers, and others to talk about the open everything movement. In the past, people involved in the movement have been called pirates and criminalized for working to revolutionize the way we share information online. Perhaps a more accurate label is “remixers” now that there’s an emerging and explicit manifesto behind this work.

Below is a video from the living, breathing, evolving documentary about creative culture and copyright on the web: RiP: A Remix Manifesto. It serves as a great example of the impact of the open movement on the music and film industries.

Of course, this post itself is another example of the open source movement and it’s power to spread ideas. I went to the RiP! website, grabbed the HTML code, copied it to my computer’s clipboard, and posted the video here. None of this would be possible without open source technologies. I’m not going to make a pirate joke at the risk of it being “too soon,” but when I look at my use of Wordpress, attraction to open source cinema, and heck, honestly, my daily use of creative commons content as a professional blogger, I’m willing to say that the digital piracy debate is equally important to understanding the future of world politics.

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