Last night’s Futurama episode on Comedy Central, “Overclockwise”, is the most digestible message for the copyleft manifesto that I have ever seen.  I highly recommend everyone watch it.  It may be the first bit of popular media we open-culturists can rally around and reference.

The Futurama crew basically gets arrested while attempting to apply GNU principles to Bender.  To speed up Bender’s virtual Nazi killing game skills, the Professor’s younger clone, Cubert, skillfully overclocks Bender’s processor in a midwifery like procedure.  Eventually, Mother, the stand in for evil corporate greed in the show, figures out how to ruin everyone’s fun by enforcing the fine print on Bender’s license agreement and throwing both Professor Hubert and Cubert into jail.  It happens that the Nazis of the MMO game that Cubert and Bender were playing were the avatars of Mother’s three children.

In jail Professor Hubert Farnsworth asks his young clone Cubert  “You overclocked Bender!!! What did I tell you about tinkering with machinery?”  Cubert “You tough me how! I didn’t even know Bender had a license agreement”

Watch Hubert Farnesworth sign away his freedom to do what he wants with what he owns... Bender

The Professor then remembers he accepted a giant license agreement that was a prerequisite to have Bender bend a bendy straw (Bending Unit = Bender). In the flash back the Professor says, “I really shouldn’t agree to things that I don’t understand…. But I’m thirsty”  And like all of us, he clicks ACCEPT.

Back in copyright jail the Professors exclaim what should be some kind of anthem of the GNU/FLO/Copyleft movement “I clicked w/ out reading!!!”. . . “and I slightly modified something that I own!!!”  “”WERE MONSTERS!!!!!!!””

Might I ad.. Comedy Central’s logo looks an awful lot like the Copyleft symbol… hm

Anyway, there are some nice nerdy courtroom scenes, references to “The Singularity” (I will  blog about soon), gaming, AND ROMANCE.  Definitely watch this episode.  I was amused to see a fully developed Wikipedia article on it WHILE it was airing.   WWII had Looney Toons.  The open source movement has at least one Futurama episode.  Next, we make some memes, and some open source cartoons to keep the ball rolling.  Who’s ready to make some Fukung splashes so people are Redditing about the open source on every paper and worthwhile website.

Please share your thoughts!  This blog is edited by viewers who are duly credited 🙂