Two recent posts at Crooked Timber have explored the distinction between attribution and copyright. The case against plagiarism has always seemed like a no-brainer to me (let’s see — pretending that you created somebody else’s work = stupid and wrong), and I suspect I have a lot of company. In fact, giving credit where credit is due is a cornerstone of the Creative Commons system (hence the popularity of “attribution” in the licenses).

At the same time, a significant motivation behind CC licensing and the Free Culture movement is to acknowledge the huge debt that today’s culture owes to the past, and to encourage the ongoing conversation, cultural borrowing, and exchange of creativity that goes on today.

So condemning plagiarism and supporting free culture aren’t mutually exclusive — we can do both at the same time. I see a pretty clear distinction between passing off your novel as my own (dead wrong) and riffing on your famous characters to write a tongue-in-cheek poem (just fine). But as one of the CT commenters astutely points out, the fact that we can make such a distinction won’t necessarily stop corporate heavyweights from using genuine outrage about plagiarism to justify more draconian copyright laws.

In fact, this may be the next battleground. Just as the word “piracy” is currently used to encompass a broad range of nefarious and not-so-nefarious activities, “plagiarism” may soon be subject to redefinition. Now is the time to think about what is worth defending. A college kid’s right to submit a book chapter as her own paper? Nah. An original essay based on a (credited, but anonymous) blog post? Hmmmm.

Whatever our conclusions, I think this is a conversation worth having…especially as more and smaller pieces of creative work are being pulled behind the protective, sometimes-suffocating veil of copyright.

Google recently announced their plans (press release) to digitize reams of printed content — millions of volumes from the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. USA Today, Newsday, and Copyfight offer some interesting details and perspective.

Details seem to be elusive as yet, but the Newsday article would imply that the originating institution will host the material on their Web servers, whereas Harvard’s press release seems to say Google will do the hosting. The question remains: what will the licensing look like on these new, digital editions? While the books themselves are public domain, will their new digital hosts try to impose their own restrictions? Will I be able to read and download the books for free, without registration, and post them on my own server, even modified or in a different format? Will I be able to re-print and sell new printed editions of these tomes? Will they be HTML format, or plain text, or perhaps a proprietary Google format? These are questions that we need to ask, and we should be prepared to lobby the entities involved to let them know that the public wants this to be as free as the air you breathe. update, 16 Dec. 2004: The Detroit Free Press quotes a UMich librarian saying the books will be in a “photographic, high-resolution image” format.

It’s interesting to note that Google is, essentially, launching a multi-million effort to do what volunteers at Project Gutenberg have been doing for decades. PG has published more than 13,000 books online — most from the public domain, a few with permission or under copyleft or Creative Commons licenses — in dozens of languages, spanning nearly every conceivable subject, under a Free license and with an emphasis on usability over the ages (most of the books are published in a plain-text format). I personally have both used and volunteered for PG. (What do you when you have to write that analysis on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and you left your copy in your locker? Just download it from PG, of course.) While Google’s project, if done correctly, is hugely laudable and a great step forward for the free dissemination of information, we can’t wait for Google to do everything, and of course, it’s not wise to rely on any one company to that extent anyway. That means there’s still lots we can do in helping get public domain content freely available online. One of the easiest, most immediate ways anyone around the world can help is by volunteering with Distributed Proofreaders. Create an account, read some brief instructions, then start proofreading anyway, knowing your work will help bring a book to public availability, freely, for posterity. (In your account, join the Free Culture team and watch us blaze up the statistics as we apply our mental “CPU cycles” for the public good.) Additionally, Free Culture, as an organization, is uniquely posititioned — as a student movement, we’re (primarily) living, studying, and working right next door to vast stores of information in our colleges’ and universities’ libraries. Organizing chapters to help digitize our libraries’ treasure troves is one of my most prized goals for FC (in the interest of full disclosure, I am a library nerd.) As evidenced by Google’s investment, there’s a huge utility to digitizing printed material — and it’s a hugely exciting development for education and the availability of information worldwide.

This mainstream news article does a great job of highlighting the user-friendly, participatory nature of new media tools. But instead of using the popularity of the iPod and its ilk to talk about the spread of citizen-produced free culture, it veers off into a worried discussion of whether our culture is amusing itself to death.

While that’s a valuable question, I think the article misses the point. The story is not so much about our desire for lime-green iPods with cute carrying cases as it is about our impetus to create. Nobody has to be taught to want to cut, paste, tweak, adapt, and pass it on — we all do that naturally, every day of our lives. The real difference is how much easier, faster, and cheaper it is to do those things today.

I sent a letter to the editor to respond to this specific article, but I also want to take advantage of this opportunity to go back to a discussion we’ve been having at FC.o since the beginning. We believe in a bottom-up, participatory culture — it’s why we sponsor contests like UndeadArt. What else can/should we be doing to support citizen creation and participation? How can we continue to push the mainstream conversation of these topics away from the polarization of sharing vs. stealing, and toward the optimistic (fun!) story of people involved in creating the world they live in?

As seen on Copyfight: Legal Affairs has an article about Lessig and the FC movement, exploring his cult of personality and accusations of Marxism (which the author refutes). The reporter begins and ends the article by describing an event at which Lessig is speaking… what is exciting is that this event happens to be the launch of FreeCulture.org!

You can actually see many of the events described in the article for yourself if you watch the video of Lessig at Swarthmore, which we have uploaded to the Internet Archive. The “home taping is killing the music industry” t-shirt is the grey t-shirt that Holmes Wilson of DownhillBattle.org is wearing as he and Nicholas Reville introduce Luke and Nelson. You can see the “Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons” sign on the podium, and you can hear the thunder from that rainy night (exactly 52 minutes into the movie).

Think about the implications of that. This video was recorded by a citizen wielding a videocamera, then uploaded to a public server at Archive.org, where it is now available for anyone in the world to watch. Doesn’t this herald the growing power of citizen journalism? By watching this video which records the original event, you can check the facts of this Legal Affairs reporter, and see if they’ve taken the facts out of context. In the analog era you would have had to go to Swarthmore and track down the physical tape on the shelves of the library, or on some individual’s bookshelf. In the era of the internet, we all have equal access to this footage.

What can you do with this power to remember, this access to information and to history? That’s an open-ended question, but the ability to gain access to the past is a vital part of keeping our future free, as 1984 suggests.

Last Monday, Franklin & Marshall Free Culture hosted a “Network Policy Information Session,” an open forum that invited members of the College community to ask questions about campus network policies. We were fortunate enough to have two representatives from Computing Services join us to discuss issues ranging from network freedom to security to online privacy. John Hoh, Director of Computing Services, took the brunt of the questions, which included inquiries about DMCA take-down notices, concerns about private information stored on College servers, and whether or not students are allowed to run services on their machines.

John Hoh, Director of Computing Services answered students’ questions about network freedom at F&M.

Mr. Hoh, with assistance from Matt Richard, the Network Access & Security Coordinator, also gave a general overview of how the campus network is laid out. He explained the multiple levels of redundancy and the hot-swappable spare components that keep the network chugging along 24/7.

So what did we learn about our network policies? In short, F&M has in place a number of reasonable network policies designed to ensure reliable access to all members of the College community. Specifically, we discovered:

* Users are allowed to run any services they wish on their computers; no ports are currently blocked save for those used by the major Windows worms. Students are given lengthy DHCP leases to publicly accessible IP addresses.

* The College prioritizes network traffic using Packeteer; 3MB/s out of 20MB/s of the College’s direct connection to AT&T is dedicated to P2P traffic, which was extremely valuable when we needed to seed Night of the Living Dead via Bittorrent. Packeteer was installed after P2P traffic began using over 99% of the network’s bandwidth, which made web and e-mail usage practically impossible.

* The College has received about 40 DMCA notices this semester about students distributing copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. No “false-positives” have been reported, and all have been complied with. In absolutely no cases was any student information given to the party claiming infringement.

* The guys running our network just want to make sure it’s available to everyone on campus. The two guiding principles for networks users are: abide by federal and state laws, and don’t impede the rights of other users of the network.

Score one for sensible policy!

What do others think are essential components of network freedom?

Thanks to everyone who brought dead art back to life in our Undead Art competition! You can now find out who our lucky winners are, though if you wish to pay your respects at the graveyard, you still can, too.

So, kudos to Gabriel Koenig and his excellent and hilarious guide on surviving a zombie attack, which snagged a place not only in our hearts, but first place in the graveyard.
We found Alex Bradbury’s photo mosaic slick and classy enough to award it second place, and Willie Draves scared us into giving him 3rd for his Zombies in Vegas MP3.
Of course, we can’t forget Ophir Ronen and Dylan Carlino for their dancing skillz in “Potpourri of the Dead.” Their talents, with the bonus points incurred for taking selections from the vampire flick Nosferatu, earned them a spot on our “honorable mention” list.

Don’t forget, though, that these bodies aren’t even cold yet. Thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, you can exhume the bodies of these entries at will, and build the next Frankenstein; rigor mortis be damned!

“Digital Mix� Music and Law Event at Yale Law School will Celebrate DJ Culture and Raise Awareness of the Laws that Threaten It

Check out Digital Mix, a Free Culture event to be held at Yale Law School on Friday, December 10th! Along with FreeCulture.org co-founder Nelson Pavlosky, this event will feature DJ Spooky, Mark Hosler from Negativland, and Mike Godwin from Public Knowledge. Nelson will be giving a 20 minute presentation on the state of the student Free Culture movement and the organization’s future plans. The Free Culture movement comes to New Haven, Connecticut on December 10th, 2004—this event is not to be missed!

The conference will take place Dec. 10, 2004, from 6:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. at the Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School, 127 Wall St., New Haven, Conn. Admission is free.

For more program information, see
http://www.publicknowledge.org/news/events/digitalmix
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/digitalmix_index.html

Event speakers:

Nelson Pavlosky is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and a founding member of FreeCulture.org. Together with co-founder Luke Smith, he made national headlines when he successfully sued Diebold Corp. in a case that helped protect freedom of speech from abuse of copyright law. The Free Culture movement has spread to numerous campus chapters under the leadership of FreeCulture.org. It is dedicated to promoting a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, by taking advantage of the democratizing power of the internet and the digital revolution, and it resists the misuse of law and technology to crush creativity and expression.

Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in NYC. He is also a virtuoso DJ and leading spokesman for the art and intellectual movement of DJ culture. Miller is most well known under the moniker of his “constructed persona” as “Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid,” a character from his upcoming novel “Flow My Blood the Dj Said” that uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of post-modern sculpture. Miller has also recorded a huge volume of music, collaborating with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers.

Mark Hosler is a founding member of the band Negativland and a legend in the art of digital appropriation. Negativland is aggressively and publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation’s copyright laws, and are often perceived as creative and funny shit-stirring anti-corporate activists, Negativland are artists first and activists second, not the other way around. Their art and media interventions have (often naively) posed questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda and perception, with the results of these questions and explorations being what they release to the public.

Mike Godwin began his extensive involvement with the legal and social issues affecting cyberspace, serving as the first Staff Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for nine years. In 1991-92, Godwin chaired a committee of the Massachusetts Computer Crime Commission, where he supervised the drafting of recommendations to Governor Weld for the development of computer-crime statutes. Mike is also a Policy Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology and recently served as Chief Correspondent at IP Worldwide, a publication of American Lawyer Media, and as an “IP Land” columnist for American Lawyer magazine.

________
Event Details
________

Who: DJ Spooky, presenting “Rhythm Science,� Mark Hosler presenting “Negativland: Adventures in Illegal Art,� Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge and Nelson Pavlosky of Free Culture.

What: “Digital Mix� a music and law event, with DJ artists bringing the future of avant-garde music to the discussion of law in the digital age.

When: Friday, December 10, 2004. 6:30pm – 11pm EST

Where: Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, Connecticut

Admission: The event is one in a series of Paysonn Wolff Lectures. Admission is free of charge and open to the public.

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Event Sponsors
________

Yale Law School Information Society Project

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School was created
in 1997 to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications,
and the new information technologies on law and society.

Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge is a public-interest advocacy and education
organization that seeks to promote a balanced approach to intellectual
property law and technology policy that reflects the “cultural
bargain� intended by the framers of the constitution.

New Haven Advocate

The New Haven Advocate is the news, arts and entertainment weekly for
the New Haven Area.

Contact:
Nelson Pavlosky
nelson@freeculture.org
973-580-7510

Rebekah Baglini
rbaglini@brynmawr.edu
610-405-0420