I have just returned from giving my talk at Duke, and it was quite excellent Thanks to FC Swarthmore member Brian Rose for taking me to the airport, my pal Kamraan for picking me up, and FC Duke leader Nicole Cederblom for letting me crash at her pad!

I was vaguely surprised when I met Professor Jennifer Jenkins, she looked really young… I suppose it makes sense for experts in cyberlaw to be young, but in general experts are expected to be old. So much for stereotypes ^_^ She showed me the pencil sketches for this awesome comic book about free culture that another law professor is working on, and it deserves whatever hype we can give it! I can’t wait for it to come out, I’ll have to get the Swarthmore library to order a copy for its comic book collection.

The talk itself went well, I apologize for forgetting to take pictures… I put the whiteboard to good use, with an illustrated summary of the Diebold case. I suppose you’ll just have to invite me to talk at your school if you want to see it I began with a disorganized summary of the free culture philosophy, transitioned into a disorganized outline of what FreeCulture.org itself does, and then finished with a polished and updated version of my Diebold presentation. I suppose a strong finish makes all the difference, because Jennifer had no criticism for me afterwards, she said I’d succeeded in giving her class exactly what it needed (they had been focusing on the Diebold case in her class, after all). Hey, as long as the customer’s satisfied, I’m happy! If you’re considering having me speak at your school, I feel comfortable referring you to Prof. Jenkins and her students for references Still, I’ll work on cleaning up my FreeCulture.org presentation for next time, so you’ll get something new and improved.

I invited my Duke acquaintance Adam to come to my talk, and while we still disagree on several points, he seemed to enjoy himself. He bills himself as conservative, and while we agree that copyright terms need to be shorter, he says that if copyright terms were more reasonable he would support more absolute copyright controls during that period of time. I’m not sure if I’m failing to work enough conservative arguments into my talk or not, I suspect that I merely failed to make a strong enough case for the need to build upon the past, but it’s a continuing issue in our organization which seems to be dominated by liberals and libertarians at the moment… why aren’t we reaching the conservatives? I continue to maintain that Free Culture is a essentially conservative book, and there is no reason why conservatives shouldn’t support us. I’m being unfair to myself, of course, because my talk was tailored to a set of law students who are familiar with the issues and arguments because they’re taking a class on the subject, and Adam (as someone who needed convincing) was an outlier. If there had been a room full of Adams instead, perhaps I would have been able to speak to his condition better, regardless of the conservative/liberal mix in the audience.

At any rate, Duke was friendly, the campus is covered in wifi, people were nice and gave me directions to wherever I needed to go… I recommend that you visit it as well!

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