FreeCulture.org is now Students for Free Culture
October 2nd, 2007 by Nelson PavloskyOne result of the new bylaws that our chapters just ratified is that our name is changing officially from “FreeCulture.org” to “Students for Free Culture”. While we finish the name change, there will be a period where our branding is inconsistent and confusing… we apologize in advance!
One problem that we’ve run into repeatedly in the past is that people have been confused about the exact nature of our organization upon hearing our name. For example, at our last US national conference, many people showed up who were not aware that we were a student organization, and many of them didn’t figure this out until the end of the conference. This name change reaffirms our focus on student activism on campuses across the country and around the world.
There has been some talk about starting an alumni organization for people who have graduated and are no longer involved with a chapter, as well as talk about starting a separate organization that is open to anyone regardless of whether they are a student or involved with a university community or not. If either of those things happen, you can rest assured that you will read about it here. Until then, we will put our efforts into educating and organizing the next generation of movers and shakers, and do that one thing to the best of our abilities.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
I’m a bit disappointed in the changing of the name of the organization to “Students for Free Culture.” While I understand that this is an organization begun by students, it is one that is fighting a battle that has relevance to far greater an audience than just students. Moreover, I would think that the organization would be able to attract more support (in terms of members and finances) by making it clear that the issues at stake are important ones to everyone, not just the student / academic community.
Too often, the current copyright debate is allowed to be cast soley in terms of the relatively minor issue (no offense intended) of the downloading and trading of music and other entertainment files. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons: First, the issue truely is a much broader one and the recent changes in copyright law and its enforcement go well beyond the question of trading music and related files. And, perhaps more importantly, allowing the copyright issue to be focused on students and entertainment files helps to enable those who are, in fact, attempting to use new copyright laws to restrict a much broader range of discussion and commerce.
Granted, current attempts to restrict the use of copyrighted materials are, in a way, simply an effort to re-fight a battle that was settled long ago and which the entertainment industry lost: consider the old issue of whether the purchaser of a music product had the authority to transfer the music purchased from its original medium to a tape cassette to be played in one’s car or on a Walkman (remember those?). By pretending that digital technology is somehow inherently different, the industry is seeking to revisit that old issue of making tapes for personal use. This is fundamentally absurd.
But, along with the old “cassette tape issue” (for lack of a better term), we are also now seeing efforts to attack the basic “fair use” principle of copyright. Copyright law has always recognized the ability of one to quote or republish material in limited amounts on a “fair use” basis, such as quoting one article within another and similar work that required some reproduction of an original work in order to facilitate publicizing or discussing that work. Why should it make a difference if the appropriate fair use quotation is one done in digital or non-digital form? Arguably, quoting a small amount of someone else’s work to discuss it or make some point involving the original work, even when that quotation becomes a digital excerpt of, for example, a movie or TV show on YouTube, is no different than quoting a length of text from a new book within a review or even another book. The issue of such fair use always was, and still should be, limiting the amount of material reproduced from the original work and ensuring appropriate attribution and credit to the original author. The current attack on copyright use seems to frequently attack such fair use of materials simply because the quotation is taking place in a digital medium. This makes no sense at all and can only serve to restrict free discussion.
Lastly, perhaps a bit off-point, but always a pet-peeve of mine, is the increasing use of copyright to turn public materials - such as government documents or other material and research produced under government jurisdiction and with taxpayer funding - into private materials that the public can only gain access to by paying fees to some private publisher. This sort of think seems to be happening with increasing frequency and seems to me to be a tragic perversion of the notion of copyright. In essense, materials produced by public organizations at the public’s expense, become converted into private documents that the public can often only access by fee - in essense paying a second time for that which it has already paid once.
For the above reasons and more, I would suggest that “Students for Free Culture” is too limiting a name for an organization that is taking on an issue of consequence to a far broader group than just students. Perhaps it is too late to be commenting on the name change, but hopefully the organization will be able to remember that it’s fundamental work goes well beyond the interests of just current students.
-Danny.