Art should be free. Artists should be paid.

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From: Jesse (jesse@fsck.com)
Date: Fri Sep 22 2000 - 13:23:39 PDT


I think I mumbled at FoRK that I'd bailed my .com dayjob earlier this summer.
A couple of you even know what I've been toiling away on. It's now official.
I can tell people.

Here's the more general 'really rough announcement' that I whipped off to a
few friends a few minutes ago.

--- Cut here --

Art should be free. Artists should be paid.

        OpenCulture helps make it possible to make works of art like books
and music freely available on the Internet, while making sure that the
artists who created them actually get compensated.

        When we initially came up with the idea for OpenCulture.org, it
seemed neat, but there wasn't much incentive for the public or for writers
and musicians to embrace a whole new system of compensating artists for making
their works available on the net. Then napster happened.

        OpenCulture.org is a new sort of digital library and publishing
company rolled into one. We allow artists to get paid to give away the
books and music they create _before_ they have to make those works available
to the Internet. We've spent the summer putting the company together and
starting to build out the legal and financial frameworks we'll need to make
this happen on a large scale. Right now, we're gearing up to build out the
technical infrastructure to allow artists to list works with us. We expect
that to be in place by the end of the year.

You can read more about what we're doing at:

        http://www.openculture.org

        Jesse


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