(((I'm really gonna miss this guy when he leaves office.)))
Link: Brazil's minister of culture calls for free digital society | Tech news blog - CNET News.com.
September 27, 2007 10:39 AM PDT
Brazil's minister of culture calls for free digital societyPosted by
Martin LaMonicaFree culture advocate and Brazilian Minister Gilberto Gil said that digital technology offers a rare opportunity to bring knowledge to under-privileged people around the world and to include them in the political process.
Gil, a renowned musician and social activist who became Minister of Culture in 2003, laid out a vision of a global, collaborative digital culture founded in freely available technology during a speech on Thursday at the Emerging Technology conference, or EmTech, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He called for loosening intellectual property regulations to give more people the freedom to use and republish digital forms of content as a way of encouraging personal expression, culture and political participation.
"Today's digital technologies represent a fantastic opportunity for democratizing access to knowledge," Gil said. "We have found that the appropriation of digital technology can be an incredible upgrade in skills of political self-management and the local political process."
As Minister of Culture, Gil helped spearhead the creation of 650 "cultural hot spots" where people have access to free software and computers, typically for the first time.
At these centers, digital content and technology rapidly becomes assimilated into Brazilian culture, he said. For example, Brazilian Indians have recorded their songs on video, participants have been inspired to pursue an "open-source hardware" initiative, and a well known Afro Brazilian spiritual leader found the means to make her tradition a "first class culture" within Brazil, he explained.
Brazil is also using test versions of $100 laptops from the One Laptop Per Child project, which Gil admitted is not working as fast as he or Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would like.
He said part of the problem is the lack of a network backbone to connect PCs to the Internet....
