FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Nelson Pavlosky | Mobile: (973)580-7510 | nelson@freeculture.org
Alex Benn | Mobile: (610)308-1770 | abenn1@swarthmore.edu
http://freeculture.org

FreeCulture.org Announces Inaugural Student Summit

A new student movement celebrates its second year of fighting for the “information commons.”

SWARTHMORE, PA — March 27, 2006 — On April 23rd, FreeCulture.org will be two years old. In that time, the fledgling student movement has taken a multi-billion dollar corporation to court (and won), spread to more than thirty college campuses in the United States, and forever changed the way people think about copyright, trademark, and patent law. To mark the occasion, Free Culture is bringing it home with a student summit and rally back where it all started: Swarthmore College, 20 minutes outside Philadelphia. On April 21-23, students from around the country will gather for a weekend to learn, share skills, network, and plan for the future of the movement.

FreeCulture.org co-founder and spokesperson Nelson Pavlosky said: “We’re looking forward to one of the most exciting events since our generation joined the battle to preserve freedom and civil liberties in the digital age.” He continued, “We’re training the next wave of Free Culture activists and organizers, who will continue to take the fight to anyone who would attempt to fence in the information commons.”

Guests will include Free Culture author and Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, Peter Decherney of the University of Pennsylvania, low-power FM experts from Prometheus Radio, Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge, and Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle. Participants will learn everything from campus organizing strategies to FM radio engineering.

Co-founder Luke Smith added: “FreeCulture.org is going to be a force in the copyright debate for decades to come. This conference represents the passing of the torch to a new generation of organizers who will continue to spread the word about Free Culture.” Of the struggle over copyright, he said: “We’re fighting a war in the shadows. The decisions legislators are making now, while no one’s looking, will determine our rights for the next hundred years. Free Culture’s mission is to shine a light into that darkness.”

Attendees can register for the summit at http://freeculture.org/summit2006/. The conference is free and open to the general public, although it is targeted at student activists.

FreeCulture.org is an international student movement dedicated to promoting cultural participation, and protecting the information commons from overly restrictive copyright, patent, and trademark law. Swarthmore students and Free Culture founders Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky successfully sued the electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems in 2003 over their illegal use of copyright to suppress information revealing flaws in their machines. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters around the world inform students about their rights as citizens of the digital age and stakeholders in our common media culture.

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One month from now, you could be arriving at home after an awesome weekend at the FreeCulture.org national conference! The event will take place at Swarthmore College, 20 minutes outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 21-23, with check-in beginning on Friday at 4pm and all events ending on Sunday at 3pm. Since on April 23rd FreeCulture.org will be two years old, we thought this would be an appropriate way to celebrate :-) Register for it now!

The schedule is not finalized, but here are some of the speakers and workshop leaders we have confirmed:

• Peter Decherney, a U Penn professor who is writing a book on copyright
• Nelson Pavlosky, co-founder of FreeCulture.org (duh)
• Prometheus Radio, leading a low-power FM workshop
• Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle, leading a workshop on “Free culture campus strategy”, and…
• Lawrence Lessig!

Friday evening will be presentations, Saturday will be workshops and participatory activities, Sunday will be planning for the future of FreeCulture.org.

Also, Saturday night we will have an awesome Pirate Party, where everyone will wear pirate garb and we will play plunderphonics and project re-mixed pirate videos as we dance the night away on our pirate ship!

If you do not come you will be missing out. Way out. Register!

In yesterday’s Philadelphia Weekly, on page 18, there’s a picture of me holding a flyer that says “Are you buying a dangerous CD?”

The story, Copy Cats, is another great media clipping covering the antics of FreeCulture.org.

Saturday, we were protesting outside Tower Records on South St.

We believe that the major music labels are using deceptive business practices and stealing legal rights from consumers. They cripple more and more new CDs with digital rights management technologies. In the most egregious case, Sony infected millions of computers by installing malicious, hidden software (a “rootkit“) onto Windows computers of users who merely inserted a Sony music CD.

I have to publicly admit that, even though I am the one pictured, I deserve little credit for the protest. FreeCulture Swarthmore students organized it; I just showed up.

I guess I was the most menacing presence. As noted in the article, I “embarrassed” the other students and pissed off the Tower Records management.

This is just further proof that, for a group dedicated to information policy wonkdom , FCo sure is good at landing earned media.

Update: this story is now also on BoingBoing; here’s the link. Thanks, Cory.
This is cross-posted from ShoutingLoudly.