In light of their National Day of Action on April 18, FreeCulture.org has signed Universities Allied for Essential Medicines‘ Philadelphia Consensus Statement.

The statement calls on universities to adopt policies that will increase the impact of biomedical research, specifically to improve access to essential medicines in developing countries. These policies emphasize an approach to managing patents resulting from university research that serves the public interest and recognizes the benefit of the public domain.

The statement has been endorsed by intellectual property experts such as Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, Pamela Samuelson, and Yochai Benkler, in addition to luminaries in science and medicine, public health, and civil society.

The Philadelphia Consensus Statement represents a sincere effort to advance intellectual property policy in the public interest, and FreeCulture.org is proud to support UAEM’s efforts on this important subject.

FreeCulture.org has begun an ambitious program to offer free web hosting to all of our registered chapters. On the web, we’ve seen a lot of successful chapters use a wiki for organizing notes and a blog for sharing ideas and events. As the national organization, we want all chapters who want these to have them, even if they don’t have tireless armies of local geeks. Today, we can provide mailing lists and a wiki to any chapter that asks!

If a chapter does not already have a wiki, we will create a new one for them, and it will spawn with default content to help them organize their activities and run an effective chapter. We have studied the wikis of successful Free Culture chapters, and used that real-world experience to create a default wiki structure that is proven to work well, so that a new chapter doesn’t have to learn through trial and error. If a chapter has an existing wiki, we can import it into our hosting setup for them, and our wiki hosting offers a number of additional benefits: we will always keep the wiki software up-to-date, we will install effective anti-spam measures, and soon we hope to offer federated logins so that you only have to sign up once to have an account on all of our wikis.

We intend to offer blogs to our chapters as well in the immediate future, in the same fashion that we offer wikis today. That would complete the basic package. Eventually we hope to add other useful tools to our chapter web hosting, such as calendar-sharing perhaps.

Our entire software stack is Free Software, of course.

freecult@www:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on www! rms would be proud.
freecult@www:~$

Our mailing lists are managed by Mailman, our wikis run on Mediawiki, and our blogs will run on Wordpress (or to be more accurate a multi-user version of Wordpress called Lyceum).

(And remember, if your chapter does have an army of local geeks, we can give you a more powerful sandbox to play in.)

The National Free Culture Conference will take place on Saturday, May 26 at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

We’re looking to bring together members of free culture chapters, groups working on free culture-related issues, and general supporters of free culture ideas. We’ll have speakers and presenters for the first half of the day and workshops/break-out groups for the second, culminating in a Free Culture party. The official line-up and schedule will be announced shortly, so stay tuned.

Housing is available and the event is open to the public. If you’d like to attend, speak, or help out with the conference, please email freeculture@hcs.harvard.edu or check out our Facebook Event.

See you in Boston!

UPDATE: A tentative schedule follows:

***SCHEDULE***

11:00am — Welcome from Harvard Free Culture

11:15am Discussion 1: Access to Research and Education
Science Commons, Wiki Education, OLPC

12:15 Discussion 2: Code, Freedom, and Control
Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu, Defective By Design

1pm: Interlude — Institute for Infinitely Small Things

1:15 pm LUNCH

2pm Discussion 3: Creating Free Culture
DJ/Rupture, Creative Commons

3pm Chapter/Project/Group Reports

4:30 Working Group Session 1
(a) Open Access, (b) Free Software, (c) Digital Media

5:30 Break

5:45 Working Group Session 2
(a) Activism and Digital Disobedience, (b) Communication and Collaboration, (c) Forming a Vision for Free Culture

6:45 Working Group Reports and Summing up

7:30 DINNER at Various Harvard Square Restaurants

9:30 Dance Conspiracy — Meet by the Harvard Square T

Schedule is subject to change.

I read via a Public Knowledge blog post that Apple is going to sell music from a major label in a non-DRM’d format. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, software that restricts what your computer will let you do with music you typically have paid for. For example, the DRM on the iTunes Music Store prevents synchronizing full-quality files to portable music players other than the iPod.

As a consumer, you can now pay $0.99 for a DRM’d song or $0.30 more ($1.29) for a DRMless version with higher audio quality (bitrate). You can also up-convert your music for $0.30.

During these approx. four years of iPod + iTunes Music Store dominance, I always thought that Apple had built its empire on the lock-in between the music store and the portable player. So this move surprised me (I checked the date - April 2, not April Fool’s). This is a very different approach to the music industry than we saw with Microsoft and the Zune, and I’d say this looks very hopeful. The Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, seemed to be a a pushover for the DRM folks; Microsoft gives about a dollar per Zune sold to Universal, a major label. That’s money handed to Universal for doing absolutely nothing. And the Zune has the famous “squirting” feature which provides very restricted music sharing, adding restrictions to any song you share.

This isn’t the first time EMI has played with selling music online without digital restrictions. Late 2006, they distributed a Nora Jones song in the standard MP3 format on both the Yahoo! music store and eMusic (a company I personally buy music from).

The way I see it, Steve Jobs is performing a market experiment. What do consumers think their freedom is worth?