At dawn we had what turned out to be our first stop: the national gendarieria held us up for over an hour while they made their way through the apparently considerable bureaucracy involved in checking all our documents. Meanwhile, we met a young hitchhiker from El Bolson, who told us his story and even wanted to join us for part of the way. He finally left us with a text he’d written.

After crossing the border into Uruguay, we came across a seriously dilapidated Vauxhall for sale by the side of the road along the way.

At 4pm we finally met up with Mariana and Jorge, who got on board in Montevideo. We continued together to Maldonado, our first stop for tour activities in Uruguay. When we arrived, a crew from a local TV station, Canal 11, was waiting for us, and some of our Uruguayan friends, Salvador, Diego, Daniel and Germán, joined us for the event.

After our TV interview, we started the activities for the day: we were in the Plaza San Fernando, where the city had provided us with sound equipment to begin our discussion with some people from the area. Despite the intense cold, people were enthusiastic from the start, and began chatting and exchanging ideas, experiences and opinions about music, sharing, techniques and so on. For the librenauts, it was an opportunity to learn about what was going on in the region, by means of a really participative event and a confluence of nationalities.

Afterwards, the talk turned into a performance: local hip-hop collective La Colmena brought an outstanding show – Teresa liked it so much she now wants to join the hip-hop community!

Dinner was at Daniel’s house, who received us with open arms, and a mountain of delicious food (and almost the first we had that day). Germán cooked up an excellent asado (barbecue), balanced with various salads, and Diego’s music compleed the scene – along with local red and rosé wines! At the end of the day, before going to sleep, we shared some grappamiel (a local honey-sweetened brandy) and got ready for another intense day aboard the Librebus!

Along with Arctic Online from Uruguay, Creative Commons Argentina will be offering during the month of September and October an online course open and free: “Art and culture in circulation: Introduction to copyright and free licenses.”

The course is for the general public (anyone can join), but mostly caters to artists, cultural managers and entrepreneurs, who want to enter in the issue of copyright and Creative Commons licenses from a different perspective than the traditional one. While in the first part we will review more generally about the basics of intellectual property and copyright specifically, the entire second half will be oriented to more practical issues associated with open licensing.

Presentation

In this course we will talk about the right to create and share freely in the network, which today is in tension with existing intellectual property laws in our countries. We’ll learn about copyright, how it works and what it does. Then we’ll review various alternatives to copyright that allow us to create knowledge and collaborative culture, and we will learn how to use them. Finally, we will see new models of knowledge production and sustainable culture working from such licenses.

This is an online course which you can participate from anywhere in the world, although the meetings and materiales will be given in Spanish.

All course activities are free and open and run alongside the route of the Southern Cone LibreBus 2012. On its journey to Montevideo, we will have a presential classroom activity, to be broadcast by streaming.

To register, complete the form at the Arctic Online site.