At 7:30 this morning, I arrived at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum. I’ve been to every Personal Democracy Forum that they’ve had, so this was old home week for me. It started off with a networking breakfast where I ran into many old friends. Even at 7:30, there were plenty of people sitting off in one corner or another doing their networking via the internet, and one person quipped that there were likely to be many people added as friends on Facebook or MySpace during the networking breakfast.

Andrew Rasiej gave the welcoming remarks and we went to the first speaker, Larry Lessig. Larry’s talk was entitled Free Culture, Free Politics. I’ve read Larry’s blog, but never heard him speak in person. It was an engaging talk.

He started off bewailing the either/or thinking, which I’ve also talked about as black and white thinking or binary thinking. He spoke about it in terms of copyright. Many people present copyright as either you are completely for it, RIAA style, including things like the DMCA and CTEA, or you are completely against it. He pointed out how this is a false dichotomy and went on to provide good examples.

Before he went into that, he explored a tactic of staunch copyright defenders to portray anyone opposed to anything other than the strictest interpretation of copyright laws as ‘communists’.

I don’t want to move on from this without exploring what I think is an important underlying theme. So many of the battles are between a radical individualism, every man for himself, where any sort of collaboration is unacceptable, and an idea that we are all in this together, part of a community, that has some sense of responsibility to our brother, to our neighbors, a sense that there are times when we can and should work together for the common good.