Computer geeks and music fans will have something in common this weekend in Winnipeg. OpenCity FreedomFest, an effort organized by the Prairie Linux Users Group (PLUG), will be the first festival in Canada to unite the concept of open source software with music and art. Kicking off on Friday evening, the festival will feature local political activists, musicians, video artists and Linux fans at four venues in the Exchange District.

OpenCity FreedomFest organizers Jason Lougheed and Syd Weidman say they hope to promote the open source concept that has allowed the Linux operating system to be widely popular, to copyright licensing of music and art. Weidman says "getting on MTV is tough" and the Internet has fostered a new way for struggling artists to get attention. And with the increasing use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software such as Kazaa and BitTorrent and the reactive lawsuits from the music and movie industries heating up, he says the public domain is all the more under attack from corporations who want to copyright culture.

"When people sing Happy Birthday, they are actually infringing on copyright." Weidman explains.

"We trying to challenge the old (business) models," Weidman said, adding that they aren't advocating copyright anarchy, but rather a flexible copyright licensing system. He points to the non-profit Creative Commons group which encourages a copyright scheme that would allow artists to freely share their work with the promise of due credit. Started by a group of lawyers and computer professors in 2001, Creative Commons is a project designed to liberate the public domain and to increase the amount of available media resources to the public.

Syd Weidman & Jason Lougheed talk about OpenCity FreedomFest

Weidman uses the analogy of science to explain that just like modern discoveries have evolved from existing ideas, musicians will be better off being free to fuse their work with existing ideas.

"People got to be creative about getting creative."