In the peaceful town of Blacksburg, VA, where none would suspect, a great evil lurks. Deep in the tablet requirements, the mandatory proprietary software bundles, and RIAA litigation letters lies The Hideous Beast of … NonFreedom. It preys on the helpless innocents, incarcerating them into vendor lock-ins, and subpoenaing their network records.

This past fall, one student organization has risen to face this monster. They call themselves Free Culture at Virginia Tech. Touting a name that makes most other students wonder what the heck their group does and whether or not it has anything to do with nudist colonies, they fight nonfreedoms as best they can. They have shown public domain movies in partnership with the Virgina Tech Union, given away CDs of free music, played Frets on Fire before meetings, and toyed around with XOs.

Occasionally, The Hideous Beast becomes too much for them, and they have to call in for help. This past month, Richard Stallman visited, and confronted it through means of speech. Shoeless, and sockless, he dealt the beast a mighty blow.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd, on the 4th anniversary of the founding of Students for Free Culture, Nelson Pavlosky will be visiting to do battle. If you should happen to be in Blacksburg, VA, come join us at 6:00pm in Pamplin 30, and see Nelson help us free Hokie culture!

I’m new to the fold, representing FreeCulture.org up in the, as Gavin and Nelson quickly discovered, still chilly city of Madison, Wisconsin. Nelson just cleared me for Blog take-off and gave me a few questions to kick things off with, so here I go!

~That’s me on the far left in the picture below~

Q: How did you get into free culture in the first place? What made you want to start a chapter?

I got interested in free culture issues long before i knew that an organization like this even existed. In 2004 I was taking a class at App State in North Carolina (my undergrad Alma Mater) called Art & Ideas that examined some of the philosophical questions pertaining to the art world. It was around this time that Dangermouse’s Grey Album came out, and i ended up framing my final paper for the class around the fair use issues that the work brought up. From there, i discovered the long-dormant illegal-art.org, John Oswald, Negativland, Fensler Films (the fine gentleman who brought us the GI JOE PSAs) and so many other mash-up artists that were creating new and challenging derivative works from the copyrighted flotsam and jetsam of pop culture. From there, i got interested in sampling laws which ended with me falling in love with hip-hop culture. I eventually wrote my undergrad thesis on the roots of that very culture, making sure to comment in the ways that DJs are recontextualizing old works for new ears.

I have just completed the first stop on a little mini-tour I am taking of Students for Free Culture chapters, beginning with UW Madison this past Saturday, continuing with Georgetown tomorrow on April 16th, and concluding with Virginia Tech a week from tomorrow on April 23rd. I would have blogged this earlier (i.e. before the first stop) if my laptop’s hard drive hadn’t died, but better late than never!

I spoke this Saturday at the brand spanking new Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with former SFC board member and co-founder of our U Florida chapter, Gavin Baker. We were both guest speakers at a symposium called Culture of Sharing, where we also led breakout sessions (mine was on Open Source and ended up being a free software installfest) and co-hosted a post-conference workshop on how to start and operate a Students for Free Culture chapter. Our UW Madison chapter’s co-founder, Angela, was kind enough to take notes for the chapter-starting workshop and send them to us, so some of that material may end up in a “how to start a chapter” kit someday. It resulted in a short article in campus newspaper The Daily Cardinal and positive blog coverage on sites like the UW infolit Community, and a good time was had by all :)

If you’re from UW Madison and you’d like to join their chapter, you should sign up for their mailing list.

Here’s a picture of me and Gavin with the founding members of the UW Madison chapter. From left to right: Chris, Justine, me (Nelson), Angela, Gavin, and Hannah on the bottom.

Some of the new UW Madison recruits expressed some interest in guest-blogging, so if we’re lucky you may see some of them on here in the near future!

To celebrate the upcoming 4th anniversary of the founding of Students for Free Culture on April 23rd, we’ve sent care packages out to all of our fully registered chapters (i.e. chapters that have a mailing address and full contact info on file). We expect all the packages to arrive by about the 17th, and certainly they should be there before April 23rd. If you are a member of an SFC chapter and your chapter representative has not received a care package by April 18th, please e-mail freedom@freeculture.org and let us know that you’d like us to ship you a care package as well.

Here are some pictures of us making the care packages if you’re curious.

If you’re wondering exactly what is in the packages, the care packages include material from: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, The Free Software Foundation, and SPARC. We won’t tell you exactly what’s in them, that would spoil the surprise, but we promise it will be fun and educational ;-) Thanks to all of our allies for their support!

Also, thanks to Gavin Baker formerly of our UF chapter, Kevin Donovan from our Georgetown chapter, and Herbert from our Swarthmore chapter for helping to package the materials, and thanks to my father Robert for helping me finally ship the darn things.