As you may know, our co-founder Luke Smith is spending the semester in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, where not only does he not have internet access, he does not have electricity. (This explains why his homepage is currently empty and out of date.) Every week he goes into town and buys an hour in an internet cafe in an attempt to catch up on his e-mail. At any rate, while he was en route to Japan at the beginning of the semester, Luke penned this letter to me, which I’ve been meaning to blog for a while, but haven’t had the opportunity before now. Here are Luke’s thoughts on the history of FC.o and its Swarthmore based precursor, as well as the future direction of the movement:

2 Sep. 2004

Nelson,

You asked me to write a history of the SCDC. I am doing so in the form of this letter, which I am beginning in the terminal at Cleveland Hopkins. Leaving the country has so far been quite the ordeal. Anyhow, in addition to my brief history, I will share with you an idea I’ve had about what SCDC could become, along with FC.o in general. OK, here goes….

A brief history of the SCDC

The Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons was the product of our freshman year idealism. I’m sure you remember that first conversation: the both of us lamenting the lack of an organization to spread the ideals of the open source / Free Software movement to other kinds of so-called “intellectual property.” In that oh-so-liberal-arts moment, we resolved to start one ourselves. It was not easy going, that year. It was already the middle of the spring semester, & few people came to our largely incoherent meetings. Worse, they weren’t the right people — they had no committment to the cause; they were more interested than involved. The school year ended, & that was that. If not for you Nelson, I never would have stuck to it.

Looking back, a big part of our failure that year was a failure to think big. No one wants to help you organize something mediocre. The way to attract people is by having big but concrete organizational goals.

(Note: fountain pens and airplanes don’t mix!)

Anyhow, we resolved to do better next year, & we did. We hit early in the semester and lured freshmen to our meetings with pizza that we paid for out-of-pocket. We found a few good people, & had weekly meetings. Lawrence Lessig’s original Free Culture flash presentation was well-received & got good coverage in the school newspaper. We still had coherence issues, & we lacked a charter, but we had energy… it was during that time that we wrote the first version of the manifesto.

Then, out of nowhere, an exciting but frightening opportunity fell out of the sky. Our friends at Why War? were hosting the so-called Diebold memos — an e-mail archive that revealed flaws in the voting machines manufactured by that company. Before long we found ourselves the target of one of the infamous DMCA takedown notices. We were unprepared for so much, so fast; those were frantic days & nights, filled with secret phone calls to lawyers, intense strategizing, & above all, raw terror. Somehow — well, through Branen — we found pro bono representation at the EFF & the Stanford Center for Internet & Society. Suddenly, we were bringing a federal lawsuit against a nearly $2 billion corporation. We assumed that a countersuit was inevitable.

In the meantime, Micah White and Why War? were spreading the Archive to colleges all over the country. More than 100 [50?] hosts risked liability by putting the e-mail archive online. For quite some time, Diebold continued to fire off takedown letters to every school that hosted the memos.

It wasn’t long before the press began to take notice of our situation, although most were interested as a result of the growing controversy surrounding Diebold’s machines & Direct Recording Electronic machines generally. Even so, one article in the New York Times was titled “File Sharing Pits Copyright against Free Speech,” which featured our overly dramatic photograph.

Though the case was certainly a lot of fun, it didn’t help us any great deal with campus organizing. People knew our name & more about our cause, but there was little they could do to help out. After the initial excitement of the case faded & Diebold backed down, we tried a few other things on campus: first, we had a LAN party, which was a raging success; second, we convinced Prof. Lessig to come speak at the College. He was brilliant, as always, delivering an inspiring speech to a packed house. Even so, however, I still felt an enormous sense of waste — the students had no end of motivation & energy, but we lacked a way to channel it into organization.

This past summer has been very encouraging; you managed to snare quite a few good people nationwide and keep them organized. Still, the cause is too nebulous & campus organizing too difficult to do — I get the feeling that, if it continues on its current course, FreeCulture will fall apart.

I think, however, that I have an idea that could help — one of several possible courses of action. I think we should make the primary activity of SCDC & FreeCulture the collection of Creative Commons licensed material created by students. We would still bring speakers & take political positions, but our day-to-day activity & five-second mission statement would be creating a thriving ecosystem of student-produced open content. The open source / Free Software movement is so inspiring because it’s not empty rhetoric; there’s a real, working community there to back it up. What better way to build a narrative of the commons than to cultivate a commons?

It would also make our organizing model much simpler & more effective. Our goal would become (1) make sure that every work fixed in a tangible medium by a student is CC licensed & publicly archived (or at least damn close) & (2) actively encouraging this kind of production & highlighting its open nature. We could start it with papers & move on to photography, music, & other artwork — the perfect union of geek & artist.

Imagine if, by the end of this school year, we had amassed a TRULY USEFUL nationwide database of student work, all under CC licenses. We could attract both funding & media attention, & develop a platform to get our larger message out.

I’m sure that Lessig and Creative Commons would love to be involved. I think we should devote all of our energy to building a real student digital commons. It’s the only way I can think of to make FreeCulture concrete enough to survive — to get into the content business.

Best regards,
Luke Smith

Luke has been pretty much out of touch with us since he arrived in Japan, apart from a few e-mails and phone calls, and a lot has changed in two months. We’re now beginning to work on legislative and lobbying action with Public Knowledge, a direction that I’m not sure Luke saw the organization going in. The SCDC has been renamed to Free Culture Swarthmore (the acronym was cool but the name it stood for was a mouthful), and with 14 chapters around the United States and growing interest in our organization following an article in Wired News and a post on Lessig’s blog, it’s difficult to make the case that FreeCulture.org is falling apart. Nevertheless, Luke’s letter is compelling, and he may be right about the course that we should take in the future. What do you think?

Free Culture Fest was awesome - thanks to everyone who helped make it a success.
A few highlights:

The planning and promotion teams did a lot of work the weekend before and during the Fest, including chalking messages on the paths around campus, hanging cloth banners on the front of a building:

and making flyers:

We had logistics meetings to discuss, among other things, our strategy of using pizza to lure people to events:

Alex also wrote a system of equations for figuring out how much of our party budget should go to each kind of food:

Eben Moglen spoke on Monday night about the “State of the Free Union,” offering an optimistic view of the spread of open source software and free culture:

On Friday evening, Jessica Litman, the author of Digital Copyright, spoke about the control that special interests exercise over copyright law. Afterward, she went out to dinner with members of the Free Culture group to further discuss some of the issues she raised.

Roughly clockwise from the left: Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, David Chudzicki, Arthur Chu (back), Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, Rebekah Baglini, Nelson Pavlosky, Jessica Litman.

Everyone had so much fun at the Diebold victory party in October:

That we decided to have an even bigger party to culminate the Free Culture Fest, with “DJ Your Own� music and dancing, notably by:

Dan Jamison

And Tim Whalen and Nelson Pavlosky

Nelson brought back temporary tattoos from the Creative Commons benefit concert in NYC, and we decided to get creative with them:

(Roughly left to right): Nathan LaPorte, Dan Jamison, Qian Li, Lauren Smith, Nelson Pavlosky, Joe Borkowski, Lisa Benson, David Stifler, Ted Warner, anonymous, Eve Lampenfeld, Alex Benn (back), Andrew Lacey (front)

See you at our next event!

There was a great article in TechNewsWorld yesterday called Free Culture Fest Targets Copyright Restrictions, about our free culture awareness week at Swarthmore, which unfortunately ends on a slightly sour note. The last person interviewed for the article seems to think that the free culture movement is about getting a free lunch. He’s wrong. The reporter writes that “some argue that what really has consumers upset is that copyright holders finally have a means to enforce their rights more effectively,” and then he quotes an IT industry analyst as saying:

“There does need to be protections of copyrighted work,” he added, “and if a lot of young people are concerned about being fed homogenized culture on the TV and radio, perhaps they need to get off the couch, start interacting with other creative people they are going to school with and come up with some original ideas of their own and stop complaining about the lack of creative vision by copyright holders.”

I’d like to reply to this last point first; as we said in the earlier Wired article, “It’s about free speech and the ability to express yourself,” not passive complaining about the homogenization of corporate media. That’s what makes us different from some other groups that oppose media consolidation. We don’t just want to break up the oligopolies, we want to create the technology and culture necessary for everyone to become an active participant, we want to be free to collaborate on and interact with and comment upon and remix the media around us. We want everyone to have their own digital printing press so that they can make their voices heard, and to give everyone the tools to make professional-quality creations even if they are amateurs. Whining about the stupidity of mainstream media is not what we’re about. We’re vaguely annoyed when the people are referred to as “consumers” rather than citizens, and the implication that what we are fighting for is the right to consume as we like, rather than the ability to be active participants in a democratic society.

The IT analyst’s language reveals a dangerous misconception about the world: he says that students should “come up with some original ideas of their own, and stop complaining about the lack of creative vision by copyright holders.” He’s right that we shouldn’t rely on the corporate media for creative vision. But if he thinks that creativity would be possible in a world where you are not free to write about or comment upon the world around you, then he is committing a fatal error. As Lessig likes to say,

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

If we cannot comment upon or recreate the world around us, then we are doomed to make irrelevant art, art that cannot say anything meaningful. To some extent we are still free to use the world around us in our art, thank goodness. Facts are still unprotected, but as more of our culture becomes owned, even the president’s words (which as an agent of the US government cannot be copyrighted) may be restricted and controlled.

Also, the ability to become a participant in culture requires that you first become literate in that culture. Free Culture advances the cause of learning, of making knowledge available to people and letting them get their hands dirty tinkering with the concepts, the syntax, the language. Look at this nascent attempt to provide a library for anyone who has access to a mobile phone, which is a surprisingly large number of people in low-income countries. In a truly free culture, this library would not be restricted to a few books experimenting with this newfangled Creative Commons license, or the books from the ancient public domain written 100 years in the past.

Of course we are worried about the possibility that we have welcomed the copyright police into our homes in the form of “copy protection” and DRM technology. We are not happy with the prospect of perfect enforcement of bad laws, laws that are less horrible when they are only used against egregious commercial offenders. Would you have been happy if you lived in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where music was banned, and you discovered that the Taliban was planning to plant a listening device in your nose so that they could tell if you were humming to yourself? You might not mind so much if the law were only applied to the loud Afghani rock band down the street that always disturbs you in the middle of praying or sleeping, or if it meant that Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were to be hung in the public square.

Of course, the troubling thing about “copy protection” is that gives copyright holders even more power over their copyrighted material than they might claim under the law. Copy protection has the potential to snuff out fair use, to prevent us from doing things which are perfectly legal. It’s not just that we’re worried about the possibility of perfect enforcement of bad laws, we’re worried about enforcement of “rights” that corporations don’t even legally have.

The IT analyst’s comparison of the disgust that citizens feel today with the way “university students felt financially violated in the early ’90s when Kinkos and other campus copy stores had to start paying authors royalty fees when professors would include copyrighted materials in class packets” completely misses the point. We are fighting for freedom, not for a free lunch. There are issues with accessibility, we do want education to be available to people who cannot afford to pay for a fancy American college, but ultimately money is not the issue. In the end, we just want to be treated as equals, not as children to be spoon-fed.

FreeCulture.org’s momentum gets a nice boost from this brief, generally accurate article in Wired News. What makes the article especially effective is that it frames the issues in fairly understandable language, even for people who aren’t familiar with them. (It’s titled Students Fight Copyright Horders.) It also mentions this week’s Free Culture Fest at Swarthmore, and quotes FC.o representatives Nelson, Nicholas, and Rebekah.

Free culture got some free press at Emory today. Andrew Swerlick, one of Free Culture Emory’s members, wrote an article for our Emory Wheel, entitled “Free music without the guilt (or lawsuits)”. The article talks about some of our favorite places, including Creative Commons and Magnatune. You can read it by clicking on the link above.