This is a summary of a project I discussed at the 2011 Students for Free Culture Unconference. I’d like to thank SFC for putting the conference together, and for inviting me to publish this post on their blog.

No society that kept its laws secret could ever be called free. No government that hid its regulations from the regulated could ever stand in our tradition. Law controls. But it does so justly only when visibly. And law is visible only when its terms are knowable and controllable by those it regulates. . . .
-Lawrence Lessig, Introduction to Richard Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society.

More must be done to increase the availability, and the visibility, of justice.

Whatever more is, I decided to be one of the people doing it. That decision is behind both my application to the David A. Clarke School of Law (DCSL) and my insistence on the creation of an Illustrated Law Journal (ILJ) while there. My passion for the idea of collecting, editing, and publishing visual illustrations of laws and legal concepts stems from the beliefs articulated in the following stanza from DCSL founders Edgar and Jean Camper Cahn’s Credo, This I Believe, that informs DCSL’s mission.

And I believe the day will come when the monopoly
      over law and legal knowledge -- the lawyers' monopoly
      the law schools' monopoly -- will be broken
When men and women and yes, even children will know that which
      is expected of them and that which they can expect of others:
            to refrain from harm
            to honor their word
            to respect the dreams of others and the right of others
                 to dream in their own way
	                                         This I believe

The opportunity to know what is expected of you, and what you should expect of others should not require a law degree. We can make the text of laws more freely available to people distributionally, but until those laws are also available conceptually, there’s room for injustice in impenetrably worded, opaque laws.

What is it?

A periodic online and print journal – each issue covering a single legal topic – that will help jurists understand their work, and interested laypeople understand the laws that affect them.

What sorts of things will go in?

It could be anything that clearly illustrates a law or legal concept. Some of the things I expect we’ll publish are venn diagrams, flow charts, cartoons, and street sign type images.

What does the Journal Need? (non-exhaustive)

• A website where the editorial process can take place.
• Illustrations and ideas for illustrations of laws and legal concepts.
• While we do have several ideas for topic areas, we’d love to have more, especially from non-jurists

Where can I learn more and contribute?

The ILJ has a google group here, documents here and an Identi.ca group at !ILJ.

Tim Hwang has a way of clearly articulating the path forward for Free Culture. Tim, formerly of Harvard Free Culture and now a Berkman Center researcher, recently gave a talk up at the University of Alberta that in many ways is a follow-up to his blog post prior to Free Culture 2008 that probed the future of Students for Free Culture.

In it, Tim posits that the copyfight – the effort started by Stallman, expanded by Lessig & traditionally undertaken by Students for Free Culture – is largely over. There are certainly important issues still at play in that cause, but as Tim explains in the speech here and slides below, the cause of digital freedom has evolved to include much more.

Three important changes in the digital ecosystem have given rise to new issues. In Tim’s thoughtful reckoning, cloud computing, increased bandwidth and broad web services have drastically changed the battle from one of well-structure copyright to one that involves previously unconsidered challenges including:

• Privacy, interoperability and portability
• Filtration
• Access to knowledge

As he notes, the Open University Campaign has positioned SFC to deal with many of these new battles for online freedom, but as we continue to move forward, it will be important to bear in mind the lessons Tim outlines. So take a listen and chime in with your comments!

It’s been about six months since the Free Culture 2008 Conference—time flies! Berkeley is happy to report that the conference was a great success. We got some good press, made some great connections, and generated a little money for the national organization. We were also treated to a barn-burner of a talk by Larry Lessig and finally got everyone together in one room. We’re so grateful to everyone who made the trip and can’t wait for the next event; we hope you had as much fun in the Bay Area as we do on a regular basis. Get hyphy.

What follows is an extremely tardy wrap-up post—call it a post-mortem. Many folks wondered where to find resources, so read on to see what’s available online.

Videos of the conference are now available in three ways. First, check out Free Culture @ Berkeley’s Blip channel (http://freecultureberkeley.blip.tv). Like any good video site, Blip will let you embed the videos on your blog and also download them for archival. They’re available in OGG at archive.org—search “free culture.” Alternately, you can check out FreeCulture.tv on Miro. The videos are licensed CC-BY, so go nuts—spread them all over the world, chop and screw them, burn them on DVDs and sell them. Just make sure SFFC gets a shout out. If you’d like source files, drop us a line at berkeley@freeculture.org.

Also, Alaskan FC-warrior Jacob Caggiano has some great interviews from the conference up on his Vimeo page.

Some great summary posts were written by Tim Hwang, Kevin Donovan, and others (if you’re ever in Mexico and need a Spanish translation of Lessig’s speech, look no further).

Lastly, you should also check out the fc2008 Flickr pool (just watch out: we share #hashtags with FurryCon 2008). I’m particularly fond of the lewd dancing at the afterparty—thanks again to Lone Wolf, ripley, Kid Kameleon, and Refusenik for spinning on the one’s and two’s.

By now everyone who needs reimbursement for travel should have received a check. If you haven’t, contact berkeley@freeculture.org and we’ll check the status. We apologize again for the delay in processing; the travel grants made possible by our generous sponsors Google and Mozilla required that we work with UC Berkeley’s business services, resulting in a longer-than-average reimbursement period. It’s definitely something that SFFC will be working to improve on for future events.

Speaking of future events—it’s about the right time to start plotting the next one. What should we focus on? Who should be there? What are our goals? Speak your mind in the comments!

(photocred: thanks, mecredis!)

One day conference dedicated to the commons! This event brings together both the commons movement in the copyright realm and the commons movement in the environmental realm to discuss the history and future of the commons and a legal systems that can protect or harms the commons.

This seminar stitches together many different threads of the commons: the historical perspective in a contemporary context, creative and artistic commons, software and “intellectual property” including patenting of life forms, personal and political commons, natural resources, media and telecommunications commons. The seminar beckons to lawyers, professors and judges whose legal training is framed by property rights and human rights, computer geeks and “techies,” humanists, political activists, food activists, and creative communities of various stripes.

Speakers include:
Eben Moglen- Founding Director, Software Freedom Law Center, Columbia School of Law
Margaret Chon – Professor for the Pursuit of Justice Seattle University School of Law and active member of the A2K movement
Cindy Cohn – Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Laura Nader – Professor University of California Berkeley
Brian Rowe – Students for Free Culture Activist and Founder Freedom for IP
Beth Elpern Burrows – The Edmonds Institute
Nives Dolšak – Associate Professor University of Washington
Mark Leier – Professor Simon Fraser University
Robert Siegal – Center for Social Justice
Peter Linebaugh – Professor University of Toledo
Louis E. Wolcher - University of Washington School of Law
Steven A. Reisler – Steven A. Reisler PLLC and NLG Activist

Location:
Seattle University School of Law
1191 E. Columbia
Sullivan Hall, Corner of 12th at E. Columbia
Seattle, WA 98122-1090

Date: Friday March 13th

The cost to Students is free!
Read more at the Law of the Commons Web Site

Register at Seattle Univeristy CLE site

Last Friday, TechCrunch posted an article provocatively titled, Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?. Based on a friend-of-a-friend tip, the piece alleged that Last.fm had “handed over” user data to facilitate the identification of U2 fans with leaked copies of the band’s forthcoming album, No Line on the Horizon. (This was before Universal Music Group copped to leaking the album and U2 started streaming it voluntarily.)

Within an hour and a half – midnight for the London-based Last.fm – the allegations were debunked. Employees responded to concerned readers directly,

“[Last.fm would] never personally identify our users to a third party.”

Last.fm’s reputation is saved, TechCrunch are lying liars, the RIAA still sucks, and then I found five dollars. Right?

Not quite. Last.fm, purchased by CBS Interactive in 2007, represents the tension driving this era in computing culture, a constant negotiation of value and privacy. I’ll enrich your database by telling you how many times I’ve rewound Las Mulas De Moreno today (five and counting) and you tell me about similar artists to obsess over tomorrow.

Billboard and Soundscan look like halfblind guesswork in comparison with the charts made possible by this kind of deep data collection. Last.fm’s revenue may draw largely from advertising but if they were to start selling custom data packages to interested corporations, would anyone stop scrobbling?

Like many FCers, I was initially so alarmed at the notion that Last.fm would “hand over” user data that I ignored the fact that Last.fm’s core operations are basically in a constant state of dry snitching on its users. Want to know who is listening to “Las Mulas”? Click the Listeners tab, and start crawling profiles for identifying information.

For some of us, this is reason enough to cease participation. In fact, several FC members have already begun brainstorming a non-commercial, decentralized alternative. Others propose ruining the data reported to Last.fm by deliberately spoofing the scrobbler software with falsified metadata.

But what about those FCers who use Last.fm, enjoy the services it provides, and accept its exchange of privacy for value? Do we demand they sacrifice this pleasure? To what end?

Rather than struggle against enjoyment of Last.fm, what if we were to maximize it? What would an enthusiastic embrace and exploration of a service like Last.fm reveal? Would we find its boundaries and be inspired to develop a successor with even greater capacity? Would it reveal new entrepreneurial opportunities that better protect user privacy without sacrificing the potential benefits of an enormous dataset?

Is this a positive, proactive, fanatic activism? Or surrender to an uncritical consumption?

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

Consider the case of YouTube, where thousands of people have been recently burned by spurious copyright claims. Every day YouTube users create and upload videos like the one above that incidentally infringe one or more copyrights. Quite often the videos – again, like the one above – are disabled because of a DMCA takedown notice. If the email we receive at YouTomb is any indication, these users rarely intended to flaunt the law or make a stand for free culture. Rather, they come to us confused at being disciplined for behaving in a way that felt ethically appropriate.

When large copyright holding organizations attempt to withdraw from popular web services, as Warner Music Group has done with both Last.fm and YouTube, they can no longer paint the users of those services as pirates, outsiders, or radicals as they once did with Napster and now do with the Pirate Bay. Instead, their withdrawal brands them perverse, confused, and out of step with widely accepted social practice.

What implications might this reversal have for the free culture activist?

Do we want those YouTube users to familiarize themselves with the arcane constraints of copyright law and the numerous variations we’ve made available? Or should the users be left alone and the regulatory institutions be compelled to struggle with a set of laws and expectations ill-suited to contemporary media ethics?

Imagine a free culture pro-activism that consistently supports, encourages, defends, and extends the everyday practices of users of services like Last.fm and YouTube. What might we gain through such radical participation?

The following is a post from a guest, Ian Elwood, who has been involved in social justice movements for some time and has tried to bring the Free Software and Free Culture movements to them. We post it here because it expresses a voice in the discussion of free network services. Indymedia London recently considered questions very much like these.  Ian Elwood’s thoughts follow.

The Internet is being used as the primary organizing tool by people in the global social justice and environmental movements, but many do not fully realize how integral technological and cultural freedoms are to having a sustainable activist movement.

As former Project Manager for CorpWatch‘s corporate accountability wiki, Crocodyl.org, I noticed that many aspects of interacting with a small but focused online community seemed contradictory. The purpose of the project is to increase transparency, accountability and respect for human rights by holding corporations accountable, yet I grappled with the lack of adoption of tools that were analogous to those aims. I wanted to find out if these themes were consistent in other online communities. My participation in a similar online community, WiserEarth.org, also showed that many activists in environmental and social justice circles are not as insistent about their choice of media and technology as they are about what kind of foods they eat, or the clothes that they wear. Although people insist on organic foods, fabrics and biodegradable soap, they tend to settle for less than what Mozilla has dubbed organic software.

WiserEarth is a site dedicated to creating connections, fostering collaboration and sharing knowledge in the environmental sustainability, indigenous rights and social justice movements. Renowned environmentalist, journalist and author Paul Hawken describes the current movement of people working towards these goals in his book, “Blessed Unrest.” His strategy for creating a directory of organizations that make up this movement was the beginning of a bottom up and global effort—now represented by WiserEarth.org. The site grew from his idea and is now a thriving online community and social networking space with over 17,000 members and 110,000 organizations. Through participating in conversations with WiserEarth staff and community members, a few common themes presented themselves.

Though its content is Creative Commons, its software is GPL and it is working on creating an open API, the majority of the community members on WiserEarth, as with most online communities, do not see the bigger picture of why these measures are important to maintaining the Internet as an independent medium where free speech, privacy and human rights are protected. The staff of WiserEarth understands these issues, but WiserEarth’s new feature development process stresses that the users of the WiserEarth platform should be the main drivers of new features. WiserEarth receives constant feedback about what is useful, what works and what doesn’t, and they attempt to accommodate community member requests as a point of process. Unfortunately, the community regularly requests bells and whistles without regard for more abstract considerations such as the negative social consequences of certain technologies.

The site regularly gets requests to integrate proprietary software into its codebase, create applications within closed social networks, and republish copyrighted content outside the terms of fair use. These things are antithetical to the work that WiserEarth wants to facilitate, because its mission is to help the global community connect, collaborate and share knowledge without restrictions. A copyrighted, proprietary and closed Internet—or online community—cannot do this. Often times selecting a free (as in freedom) tool is not considered, because the gravity of this situation is not felt by the community member making the request.

In this case and in others, I would like to see more community members making requests for integration of software, standards and other related tools that are held to a higher ethical standard. WiserEarth has shown a commitment to the underlying values of the larger free culture and open source movements in its actions, but has not formally made a commitment to the sole use of free and open source tools. It would be good for this commitment to be made, but action will not be taken unless there is a groundswell of community support for ethical web tools.

With a “Yes We Can” attitude on the mind this month, I urge people in the Free Culture community to help WiserEarth by being counted among its members. It would be helpful to have Free Culture people join discussions and educate people about open source, free software and the importance of keeping the Internet free for everyone. WiserEarth is an excellent platform for these discussions, because its members represent a large segment of the global social justice movement—namely the ones who are using Internet technology as a part of their social justice organizing. It is a good wedge community for educating and building more connections between communities advocating for software freedom, media justice, social justice and free culture.

This morning, Tim Hwang of Harvard Free Culture posted a provocative critique and vision statement for the future of SFC. Recognizing that “times have changed”, Tim challenges us to consider our role as student activists in today’s salient tensions lest this organization lapse into “irrelevance.” In particular, he suggests four actions to address areas of concern that have not yet received our attention at a national or international level;

1) Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works

2) Connect With the Development Community

3) Encourage Open Access Nationally

4) Promote Data Portability

Tim’s blog post is the perfect starting point for a discussion that we both hope to see carried out in person at October’s conference. I urge you to take a few minutes to read his thoughts and offer your reaction. The conversations around free culture continue to change and so must we.

Last weekend, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple has built a “kill-switch” into every iPhone to terminate any “malicious or inappropriate” programs that somehow got through their application screening process.  Of course, nobody but Steve Jobs knows what “malicious or inappropriate” means, or who decides what qualifies, but this is just another way that Apple is showing the possible downside of a highly centralized and proprietary platform.

(By contrast, I assure you that not only does the FreeRunner have no kill-switch, but even iPhones that are jailbroken through less sanctioned means are not subject to the same remote control.)

This revelation by Steve Jobs shouldn’t surprise anybody, as it’s in line with the traditional Apple walled-garden philosophy, but it still represents a major step in the wrong direction.  By asserting absolute central control over iPhones in the wild, Apple has solidified the iPhone’s status as a “tethered” device, and mark Jonathan Zittrain’s words, tethering is like DRM but worse.

There are a lot of things that are appealing about the iPhone for both users and developers: it’s a beautiful, shiny device, it’s in a lot of people’s hands, and it has a lot of killer features that aren’t in any other popular devices.  But really, allowing this tethering to happen without protest strongly sends the wrong message to tech manufacturers.  And if we’re quiet about tethering now, it will be a lot harder to kill it later.

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.

In accordance with our new bylaws, Students for Free Culture is having an election for a new board of directors.

The candidates, in alphabetical order:

Brendan Ballou, Columbia University
Fred Benenson, New York University*
Kevin Driscoll, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christina Ducruet, Brown University
Jan Hendrik Grahl, University of Florida
Nicholas LaRacuente, Swarthmore College
Ben Mazer, Swarthmore College
Hani Morsi, The American University in Cairo
Nelson Pavlosky, George Mason University School of Law*
Parker Phinney, Chadwick School
Karen Rustad, Claremont Colleges*
Elizabeth Stark, Harvard Law School*

*incumbent

Chapter liaisons will be casting their votes between now and February 3. You can read the candidates’ platforms and their responses to questions during one of our IRC debates.

Good luck to all the candidates!