I had a simply amazing time at the Creative Commons benefit concert! I got to meet Mark from Negativland, and the CEO of Meetup.com, and I got a front row view of David Byrne of the Talking Heads live!

Here’s David Byrne in the middle of singing “Psycho Killer”.

Everyone awesome was there, including Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito (who I unfortunately didn’t meet, or at least I didn’t recognize him if I saw him), Nick and Holmes from Downhill Battle, and all of the Creative Commons folks I met while I was in San Francisco interning at the EFF.

But of course, the number one reason I went to the CC concert was to meet our fellow FreeCulture.org members at NYU and Columbia, and they were as groovy as I imagined they would be We all were volunteering to help staff the merch table, and we got to talk to lots of people who had never heard of Creative Commons or free culture before, as well as many people who had. Sadly, we were probably the youngest people there, but hey, that’s why we’re starting a student movement!

Fred Benenson, who’s starting a Free Culture group at NYU … and a little CC logo we made out of CC buttons

Sid from Columbia and Inga from NYU… Inga was the official temporary tattoo applier, she rocked

After the concert wrapped up, we realized that they had these giant CC signs that would look totally radical in our dorm rooms!

So Sid took one back to Columbia and Fred & Inga took one back to NYU.

All in all it was a lot of fun! I’ll be in NYC again intermittently from October 9th-16th, working on free culture stuff… I’ll be attending a conference at Columbia on generic drugs which will be discussing a vaguely Creative Commons-like license for drug patents (the Equitable Access License), trying to catch up with old friends, and trying to recruit people at the CMJ music festival.

We’re beginning to see some activity at the new campus groups that we’ve started this fall. The Swarthmore College Phoenix interviewed Desirina at Emory and Rebekah at Bryn Mawr, as well as my illustrious self, about how they got interested in free culture and their plans for their new groups (Free culture movement hits campuses across the U.S.). You can see a few pictures from the third Free Culture Swarthmore meeting of the year below (yes, we were stupid and didn’t bring a working camera to the first two significantly larger meetings).

I wonder why all the girls gravitate towards me?

Marie needed some water to survive this overly long meeting. Our first meeting took about 2 hours, this one took only 1 hour 20 minutes, a 30% improvement! At this rate, we won’t even need to have meetings in a few weeks Our apologies, we will try to keep future meetings under an hour.

Jeff carries a 2X4 to all of our meetings, just in case an RIAA representative shows up.

Andrew and Nathan raise their hands, volunteering for another perilous mission!

This large stick is much more effective at getting attention than a gavel would be.

I must have said something terribly interesting, look at how attentive they are!

Writing on the whiteboard makes me look stoned, for some reason.

That’s all for now, we hope to have pictures from other FC.o groups in the near future on this blog!