As you may already know, Students for Free Culture was in the New York Times on Wednesday (File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints), which made us very happy except for some inaccuracies that crept into the article. Here is the letter to the editor that my fellow Board member Elizabeth Stark sent to the NY Times in response, and which happily was published:

Free in Speech, Not Cost

In “File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints” (Education page, Oct. 10), Students for Free Culture is portrayed as an organization that promotes the illegal consumption of music and movies free of cost. In fact, we deeply believe that authors and creators should be compensated for their work, and we are eager to promote ways to do so in an environment where the world can build upon their creations.

For example, an author may release a book under a free copyright license, spurring on sales, or a band may allow fans to share and remix their songs, selling out concerts as a result.

We stand for a culture where everyone has the right to participate and where works are made available for all to legitimately access, share and remix. This is a culture that is “free as in speech” — not necessarily one that is free of charge.

Elizabeth Stark
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 10, 2007

The writer is a founder of the Free Culture Group at Harvard.

(Elizabeth has released the letter under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

There are some other incorrect facts and misleading implications in the article (which we may address in future posts), but we’re just glad to have mainstream media recognize the importance of the free culture movement as a whole and Students for Free Culture in particular, even if they don’t seem to fully understand what “free culture” means.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 2:36 am and is filed under Commentary, FC.o in the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.