This Russian site is linking to FreeCulture.org. Putting it into Babelfish causes an error, so I can’t tell what the article is about. At least with languages that use Roman characters I can make some guesses as to what they’re saying. This Cyrillic alphabet is a pain in the butt. Can somebody who reads Russian check the page out and at least tell me what the gist of the article is and what kind of a site it’s on? Thanks a gazillion!

P.S. This Livejournal community also mentions us:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/za_lib_ru/58701.html

That works in Babelfish and I kind of get what’s going on. The poster makes an interesting point at the end, according to Babelfish: “American students are concerned, first of all, by access to the music and the films. In Russia The situation Is another: as it is assumed to the most reading people, on the agenda - the protection of right to reading. However it seems to us there is to what to learn in the Americans - both in the plan of line of reasoning and in the plan of organization.”The right to read! Richard Stallman talks about that! I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that though, it’s probably not what RMS means… do they mean they fear government censorship, and that’s why filesharing is important for them? Are they worried because they can’t buy books, so they’re anxious to find free learning/reading material online?

I’d like to contribute to the discussion, but of course I can’t. Can somebody who understands FreeCulture.org go in there and make sure they understand who we are? One thing I would like to emphasize is that it really is an international student movement, and once we have some good, high-quality articles on the site in English, we will start up a wiki for each language, so that non-English-speakers can join in and help contribute.

As my dad pointed out recently, there are several problems that we run into when trying to pitch FreeCulture.org or the SCDC to the general public.

(1) The insidious injustice that we are trying to correct does not appear to be an issue that is clearly wrong or objectionable when viewed superficially, everything seems perfectly clear (”what’s wrong with artists controlling their work?”). It’s only after the intricate details are extracted and revealed that you start to realize that all is not right with the world.

(2) This is an issue that is very complex, potentially emotional and very hard to explain in 100 words or less. The audience needs a long attention span to get the “big idea”, largely because they don’t have the necessary background information. Our issues don’t reduce easily to “sound bytes”.

One approach that we can take is to get people to use things that demonstrate free culture in their daily lives, without evangelizing. For instance, even if a lot of people start using free software for reasons having nothing to do with ideology, it is then easier to sell them on the benefits of other examples of free culture.

Also, to a large extent, many examples of free culture already exist in daily life, but this can be difficult to demonstrate without long explanations. However, we should be able to show people how they already support free culture in many ways and they just don’t know it :-)

Finally, the usual education/outreach program could work wonders, with attempts to garner media attention etc. The fact is that people just don’t have the necessary background to understand the controversy at hand, and if we can lay out the facts for them in a way that is relevant to their lives, they can make up their own minds.

Of course, there is the four-point program we outline on our wiki.

What are your ideas? How do you think we can best reach out to the public? Leave comments!

Mother Jones, a magazine for social justice, writes about FreeCulture.org founders Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith in their “Hellraiser” column on activists in the May/June 2004 issue.

Swarthmore College Students to Launch International Movement for Free Culture

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 20, 2004
contact:Nelson Pavlosky, Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons
mobile:973-580-7510 | home:610-690-3892 | freedom@freeculture.org
Nicholas Reville, Downhill Battle
phone: 508-963-7832 | email: npr@downhillbattle.org

SWARTHMORE, PA - On April 23, students at Swarthmore College will launch a new international student organization dedicated to fighting coercive copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information. The event will feature a keynote speech from Lawrence Lessig and the founding meeting of the new student organization. The new group will leverage the power of students at colleges and universities around to the world and promises to be a leading voice for copyright reform, online rights, and free and open-source software.

This new organization follows the success that Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons has had with their lawsuit to stop Diebold Election System’s abuse of copyright law. A partner in this new organization is music activist group Downhill Battle (downhillbattle.org), best known for their historic Grey Tuesday protest in which 170 websites defied cease and desist letters from EMI Records in a day of coordinated civil disobedience to fight music censorship and support sampling rights for artists.

The featured speaker at the event is author and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who represented book publisher Eric Eldred in the groundbreaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig has been named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.” The founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, he is the author of Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain as well as a member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community at the University of Pennsylvania. Lessig will speak at Swarthmore in the Science Center Lecture Hall (Room 101) at 7 p.m.

Students from a many different colleges and universities are expected to attend the lecture and planing meeting that will follow. April 23 will also see the official launch of FreeCulture.org, a site which will serve as an informational base and organizing tool for new organization. The group is dedicated to what it calls a “bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture,” which it says is under assault by the recent expansion of intellectual property law.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit http://scdc.sccs.swarthmore.edu.

Michael Moore mentions an open-source alternative to electronic voting and the Diebold fiasco.

Instead of voting on easily-hackable computer systems that leave no paper trail and are run by a CEO that has promised to do “everything in my power to see that Bush is re-elected,” we have an open-source alternative. Now all we need is an open-source government to vote for.

In the spirit of Ted Nelson’s linked quotations idea, where instead of copying and pasting text you link to the original source, Trevor F. Smith has produced a version of Lessig’s Free Culture with anchors for each paragraph. Hott! Now we can quote Lessig like we’re quoting from the Bible! Lessig actually used this site to quote himself while rebutting Stephen Manes. Trevor also provides a purple numbered version of Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow, which is also released under a Creative Commons license. It’s amazing to see all the wonderful things that the free culture ethos enables…

AKMA blogged about how it sucks that Air America chose RealPlayer for their audio stream, when RealPlayer is almost as evil and proprietary as Microsoft (although at least RealPlayer offers a Linux client). Aaron Swartz noted in a comment that he finds it unlikely that Air America really cares about supporting the RealPlayer empire as an example of business as usual:

I suspect the real (npi) answer is that they had an incredibly high demand for their stream, and Real offered to let them use their large mirror network for free or cheap if they used RealAudio. (Notice that the broadcasting servers are all Real servers.)

The elegant solution to this problem would be P2P streaming, such as that offered by PeerCast. I don’t know why more people haven’t heard of it, it’s cross-platform and open source (GPL), what’s not to like? This definitely deserves a Slashdotting… (hint, hint) I’ll try to install PeerCast sometime this weekend and go looking for PeerCast streams, hopefully it’s not blocked somehow on the campus network. Everything cool like Bittorrent is blocked here at Swarthmore. Boo! Hiss! According to the FAQ, PeerCast normally uses port 7144 and 7145, and if those are blocked (which seems likely), then we probably won’t be able to use PeerCast behind our firewall.

Everyone should try to make clear the legitimate uses of P2P technology to their colleges, gone are the days when everything worth sharing was “pirated” — we are starting to see a true Creative Commons emerging from the fear and uncertainty that plagued digital creativity only a few years ago. We at FreeCulture.org believe that it no longer makes sense to try to make money from restricting access to your ideas and information; we must look for newer, better business models, like Magnatune. Rather than their “we are not evil” slogan, perhaps Magnatune should say, “we are not afraid”… not of the future, not of their customers, and certainly not of the big outdated dinosaurs that they have to compete with.

Free Culture Wiki: Piracy Hits a New Low (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog) - In a brilliant satire, blogger Aaron Swartz pokes fun at those who swear that free culture will destroy us all. One of the awesomest results of Lessig releasing his book Free Culture under a Creative Commons license is that somebody has placed the entire book in a Wiki, where anyone can edit it. It will be interesting to see how the community improves upon the book. Currently it seems to be interested in linkifying things in the book, but in the future no doubt the community will be able to keep the book alive and up-to-date. Score!

There is a competing project at eAsylum.net which uses the Drupal system. I’m convinced that the Wikipedia software (Mediawiki) is a superior system for collaborative editing on a large scale, which is why we’re using it on FreeCulture.org. I could be wrong, however, and I reserve the right to change my mind :-) However, the Drupal version seems to be a closed process, you have to e-mail the admin to get permission to participate. There are advantages to a closed approach, but we at FreeCulture.org believe that the advantages of the open approach far outweigh the disadvantages. One part of free culture is the freedom to contribute and participate, and an open Wiki welcomes that in a way that no closed site can.