One slippery subject in “intellectual property” is trademark law. When someone tries to abuse their trademark, it’s not hard to notice — and to do something about it, as in the case of Barbie in a Blender. What’s less clear is what to do in that nebulous realm where trademarks intersect with free software, free content (like Creative Commons-licensed material), and the groups who work with them.

One well-known example is Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser. The source code is open, but the trademarked logos, etc. are not. I don’t want to pick on Mozilla — they’re just one prominent example.

I don’t think it’s neccesarily a bad thing. A trademark is supposed to be just that: a distinct mark by which consumers can recognize a product or company. There’s nothing wrong with helping consumers identify products, nor with helping businesses and organizations stay recognizable. The problem is in knowing if you’ve gone too far.

There is, of course, basic information about trademarks available, both online and in print. Naturally, though, most of that information is aimed at how to “protect” one’s mark. As far as I’ve seen, there’s precious little about how to use your mark responsibly: what to register and what not, which uses of a mark to allow and which not, how to tell the difference between infringement and fair use, etc.

Such a document — a short “best practices for trademarks” — seems like it’d be useful, especially for authors of free software and people concerned with freedom. (I don’t think Mattel’s going to pay much attention.)

We at FreeCulture.org are not the right people to write that paper. We’re not lawyers; most of us aren’t even law students. But a small contingent of present and future lawyers follow what we do — and we know where to find others. So we can’t write it, but if anyone out there is interested working on such a paper, we can help you find collaborators and reviewers, help you work together, and help distribute the final draft.

If you’d like to work on the paper, add a comment on this post or send an e-mail to freedom@freeculture.org.

Our bourgeoning little student movement has made it to everyone’s favorite fly-over state—Ohio. This fall, Ohio University is starting a Free Culture chapter.

My name is Dan Corbett, and I’m a senior journalism major at Ohio. In keeping with the Nelson-as-cult-like-figure theme (he did start all of this, after all…), I met Nelson this summer while we were both working in Washington, DC. I had just read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig and was wandering around Northwest DC, and like any normal intern, I was lamenting the evils of American copyright law. Nelson and I discussed the book, which is a pretty grim indictment of our legal system. Thankfully, some green tea and the musical stylings of Queen made our conversation a little lighter.

But I was still angry. My eyes had been opened to one of the most nefarious areas of law. I realized that we live in a world where people who share music with each other are considered criminals and are subject to millions of dollars in federal fines and even prison time. And artists who build on other people’s ideas to make something original and beautiful have also been made into outlaws. Our laws deprive people of access to art and literature that could shape their lives. That’s when I decided to start a Free Culture chapter at Ohio.

Like many great student movements of our time, it all started with a Facebook group. Soon, however, we will be an official student organization and have meetings and activities. We are planning on having students debates and discussions, participating in local activism, hosting music-mash dance parties, LAN parties, and perhaps even making some open source beer.

Anyone with questions or anyone interested in the chapter can email me at dcorbett@gmail.com.

An article in this week’s Newsweek magazine quotes Nelson — and has a photo of him hiding under his desk. Yup, he’s wearing a Creative Commons shirt.

The article, “High-Tech Hot Spots”, is about how new technologies are changing colleges — and how colleges are changing technology. Nelson’s quoted in the last paragraph, as a “student active in the copyright wars over file sharing.” No reference to FreeCulture.org, though — but we all know what they’re talking about.

I grabbed a copy in my university library, and scanned it to my Flickr (sounds like fair use to me!) — so you can see the print version here.

If you’d like to see a Diebold slayer up close and personal, I will be speaking at Duke University on Wednesday, September 14th, at noon, in an as yet unknown location Room 4049 of Duke Law School. Professor Jennifer Jenkins of Duke Law invited me to address her seminar, called “IP, the public domain, and free speech”, which focuses on how the public interest is defined and defended in formulating IP policy. We decided to open this lunchtime event to the whole campus, not just the students in the class, so if you’re there, please come!

UPDATE: The undisclosed location has been disclosed! It will be from 12:05-1pm in Room 4000 4049 of Duke Law School, and it will be a brown bag lunch. This should be an excellent opportunity to meet other Duke Free Culture people and chillax ^_^ Bring a friend!

UPDATE 2: They’ve switched me to room 4049, because that room has a projector for my laptop. Ph34r my multimedia presentation! So yeah, you’ll be able to find me there.

Ahoy everyone!

My name is Rebecca Ryder Neipris, and I’m in the (extended) processs of starting an FC chapter at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I met Nelson at a conference I co-organized in June 2004 at Penn called “Knowledge Held Hostage: Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age.” Scary, huh? My experiences at Annenberg catalyzed me; with much encouragement from Nelson and others I met along the way, I realized I had to found a chapter at Brown.

As an English major, I find myself bothered by the more abstract philosophical implications of things like copyright legislation. I’m involved in several organizations on my campus, including the Ivy Film Festival and a weekly newspaper, as well as being an English teacher for speakers of other languagues, and I find that intellectual property is always relevant, however underlying. The ever-presence of this issue reinforces an ever-deepening need to act and encourage action. I’m less comfortable discussing the more technical aspects of FreeCulture, but am eager to learn. I look forward to seeing a variety of orientations and experience in group membership this Fall.

As our weekly paper, the Indy, reported last April, the Brown professorial community has been confronting an extremely restrictive amendment to the Patent and Invention Policy and the Copyright Policy: a faculty member’s free time no longer exists. Any work done, whether it is on paid university time, on sabbatical, vacation, or after hours, is UNIVERSITY PROPERTY. Negotiations are still in progress, and though the measure was tentatively approved, ambivalence and unrest remains in the faculty. (Go here for the full article.)

This issue, along with the requisite prosecution of a few Brunonians for illegal downloading, seems an appropriate springboard for FreeCulture@Brown. I am confident that our chapter will be relevant and active. Hope to have plenty of excitement to report as we get off the ground!

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing claims (don’t worry, we believe him) that MSP, a new British ISP, “has secured a license from Sony that allows its customers to legally share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog with any other PlayLouder MSP customer, and to download these tracks from any ISP customer in the entire world.”

Apparently, PlayLouder MSP DSL costs about the same as other DSL offerings in the UK, but subscribers will gain the ability to legally download any music which Sony-BMG holds the copyright to (including “out of print” tracks), to share any of that music with other PlayLouder MSP subscribers, to do so using any file format at any bitrate and using any software. The music can originate from anywhere - P2P, CD, radio recording, etc. MSP is also in talks with several indy labels in an effort negotiate the same deal with them as well.

The system does have its drawbacks, however. As you’ve read, subscribers can only share with other subscribers, and on top of that MSP will be analyzing traffic to try to determine how many Sony-BMG songs are being shared (though this is, according to MSP, only to determine how much they must pay Sony-BMG). Using this technology, they will be actively blocking recognized songs from leaving their network, while allowing unrecognized files to flow like normal.

Although this setup isn’t perfect, it’s certainly the “best thing to happen to the copyfight” in a long time. As Cory points out, this is a lot like the Voluntary Collective Licensing system the EFF has been working towards for years. I personally don’t think that you should need a license to share music non-commercially, so I don’t think that this type of system should even be necessary, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. Hopefully we’ll be seeing many more deals like this in the future.

For those interested, PlayLouder MSP is set to launch at the end of September.

Hey folks… here’s a preliminary list of the new chapters that are starting up this year. If you go to one of these schools, you should definitely talk to our organizer there and help them out!

Some of these people don’t have their e-mail addresses listed, because I haven’t gotten their permission yet… if you’re at their school, you should be able to look them up. If you are one of those people without e-mail addresses, give me your permission, or leave a comment with your e-mail address.

Definitely

• Brown - Rebecca Neipris - rrn@brown.edu
• California College of the Arts - Sarah Hromack - forwardretreat@gmail.com, www.forwardretreat.com
• Columbia - Thessaly La Force - tzl2001@columbia.edu ** Sid Srivastiva
• Duke - Nicole Cederblom
• Emerson College - Andy McPherson - andrew_mcpherson@emerson.edu
• MIT - Lauren Oldja - oldja@mit.edu
• Ohio University - Dan Corbett - dcorbett@gmail.com
• Princeton - Harlan Yu - harlanyu AT princeton DOT edu ** Stephanie Wang - sweiwang@alum.mit.edu
• Rutgers (School of Law, Newark) - Edward Mullins - emullins@pegasus.rutgers.edu
• Scripps College / Claremont area schools - Karen Rustad - krustad at scrippscollege dot edu
• University of Alaska Fairbanks - Anthony Patarini - ampatarini@gmail.com
• University of California, Riverside - Julian Krause - freeculture at thecrypto dot org
• University of Pennsylvania - Bill Herman - Bherman@asc.upenn.edu
• University of Southern California - Cameron Parkins - parkins@usc.edu
• Yale - Javier Botero

Maybe

• The New School - Antwuan Wallace
• Mounds Park Academy - Eric Bailey
• Rochester Institute of Technology/Rochester area schools - Luke Stodola - fc AT dxdt DOT org
• University of California, San Diego - Daniel Goodman - dbgoodman@gmail.com
• William and Mary - Matt Price
• Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú - Luis Gustavo Lira
• University of Campinas, Brazil - Luis Felipe Strano Moraes
• University of Kwazulu Natal, Howard College Campus, South Africa - Kofi Mangesi - 205521508@ukzn.ac.za

Despite all of the text on our website, it’s been surprisingly difficult to find out exactly who we are by reading it. But fear not… For those anxious to know more about FreeCulture.org, we now provide an about page! Although we enjoy having an air of mystery, we plan to leak more information about ourselves onto the web in the months to come. Keep your eye on this blog for more updates!

Update: I fixed a few problems on the page. As always, feel free to comment on this entry or contact us to let us if you find the new page useful, suggestions, etc. –Gavin

Hi, I’m Karen Rustad and I’m a sophomore at Scripps College. This fall I will be starting up a Free Culture chapter in the Claremont Consortium, a closely-knit group of five undergraduate schools east of Los Angeles.

At the moment, however, I’m finishing my three months working as a housekeeper at Fair Hills Resort in the middle of nowhere, MN. Between the resort and the nearest city lies fifteen miles of farms, lakes, and mosquitoes. The main music resource is Fargo’s ClearChannel country stations. It doesn’t exactly look like Free Culture territory. However, even here I have experimented with FC activism.

On Thursday nights, Fair Hills holds a staff/guest talent show. There’s card tricks, contortions, skits, and dancing. I wanted to do something unusual, and I had just learned to use GarageBand. Thus, I decided to try performing a one-woman a capella version of the song “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, using my computer to record and mix the separate parts.

You can listen to the song here.

Anyway, the act was a hit. Every Thursday night, a gaggle of children (including, one week, the progeny of some Sun and Microsoft executives) would follow me around exclaiming, “Wow! That was wicked awesome!” Every morning after, parents would approach me and ask, “How did you do that? My kids keep bugging me about getting a program so they can do it too.”

I’d tell them first about GarageBand, since that’s what I used. But I was always sure to mention other mixing programs like open-source Audacity. Some of those guests’ kids are now downloading such programs and experimenting for themselves.

None of this can be called *political* activism, per se. As a staff member of a socially conservative vacation spot, it wasn’t the time or the place for a fair use rant. But I feel that putting the tools of the trade–mixing programs, free software, etc–into the hands of average citizens is an equally important goal.

Promoting creativity and political activism are equally necessary parts of a healthy Free Culture movement. However, when reaching out to new audiences that are unfamiliar with free software, musical sampling, or any of the movement’s other common denominators, it is a powerful strategy to start with promoting creativity.

It’s easy to get people to understand that suing Aibo owners for teaching their dogs to dance jazz is stupid. It’s harder to make them care enough to do something about it. The challenge lies in showing how overrestrictive IP law affects the life of the average citizen. Here lies the method behind my little talent show madness. The point of the demonstration is to show that remixing isn’t just for DJs anymore–it’s for everyone. Therefore, the legal and political issues involved may also acquire wider significance. My hope is that gaining awareness of these issues involved will be a future step for the kids on the resort.

It’s not just music-loving technology neophytes that are having a hard time understanding DRM - the bands don’t get it either. According to Copyfight , the Dave Mathews Band has been “giving fans directions for dealing with DRM-hobbled CDs and encouraging them to appeal to Apple to collaborate with others on an easier way to move music to the iPod.” Normally, that would be just fine… if the problems were actually the fault of Apple. As we’ll see in just a second, however, the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of their record company and Microsoft. Here’s the text of the band’s recommendation:

INFORMATION REGARDING DOWNLOADING STAND UP SONGS TO IPODS
Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod:

If you have a Mac computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.

If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the CD to automatically start. If the CD does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer, locate the drive letter for your CD drive and double-click on the LaunchCD.exe file located on your CD.

Once the application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.

Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.

Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher. You may also play them in any compatible player that can play secure Windows Media files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp, but it will require that you obtain a license to do so. To obtain this license, from the Welcome Screen of the user interface, click on the link below the album art that says. If your music does not play in your preferred player, click here. Follow the instructions to download the alternate license.

Using Windows Media Player only, you can then burn the songs to a CD. Please note that in order to burn the files, you need to upgrade to or already have Windows Media Player 9 or greater.

Once the CD has been burned, place the copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would a normal CD.

Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above.

For those of you that may still be scratching your head about how this isn’t Apple’s fault (Dave Mathews Band, this means you!), let me explain. Here’s what we can determine from the recommendation:

• The CD works just like normal on Macs. This means the problem is Windows only. (GNU/Linux isn’t even mentioned, as it has no native support for any DRM)
• The DRMed Windows Media Audio files are already on the CD. This was done by the record company.

This copy-prevention system works by using the “autorun” feature of Windows, which is on by default, and allows software on a CD to run as soon as it is inserted. The software it runs disables the reading of audio tracks from the CD, making ripping software, like iTunes, useless. The other option is for iTunes to use the restricted WMA files. The problem is, Apple can’t do this. They can’t do it legally, anyway. The DRM contained in the WMA files is Microsoft’s proprietary secret, and it is illegal according to the DMCA to reverse engineer that system. So, if anything, fans should be petitioning the recording companies to stop putting restriced, inferior files on their CDs.

This situation really helps to illustrate why DRM is doomed. The users hate it, the bands don’t like it (and in this case, are even advising users on how to bypass it) and it simply doesn’t work. It’s a hassle to consumers and only exists due to bad legislation. However, by not buying DRMed products and supporting sensible copying policies, we can quicken the demise of the failed experiment known as DRM.