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!

The day after Christmas, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), part of which contained a mandate for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health to be made publicly accessible within a year of publication in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. This is huge news for many reasons, as SPARC’s Peter Suber notes, in particular because

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations. As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day. … Its OA mandate will not only free up an unprecedented quantity of high-quality medical research. It will also make a giant step toward cultivating new expectations –among researchers, funders, governments, and voters– that publicly-funded research should be OA.

Around the same time, the European Research Council also released its guidelines for open access, which affirm academia’s principles of sharing knowledge as widely as possible and make open access mandatory for all ERC-funded research.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. The federal government funds plenty of research through agencies other than the NIH, not to mention research not funded by the government at all. The yearlong embargo in getting the latest medical research is also less than ideal. But this is still a great step forward, one which will hopefully encourage other agencies and individual academics to release their research freely.

Students for Free Culture is proud to have participated, along with many of its member chapters and other organizations, in last February’s National Open Access Day of Action to raise awareness of access to research issues among students and pressure congresspeople to support HR 2764.

Read Students for Free Culture board member Gavin Baker’s analysis of the bill’s passage and the NIH’s subsequent policy changes.

Also, the winner of SPARC’s viral video contest, of which I was a judge, was announced at last weekend’s American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Check it out:

Last month, the U.S. chapters called our representatives to let them know about a flaw in H.R. 4137 and H.R.3746, two important education bills. We let people know that in its current form, the proposed legislation to renew the Higher Education Act of 1965 includes provisions that could unnecessarily burden networked computing in academic institutions. Despite our best efforts, however, the bills made it out of committee with the troubling language intact.

To emphasize our concern, we have drafted a Students for Free Culture Open Response to H.R. 4137 and H.R. 3746 that outlines the weaknesses embedded in the bills as written. Please take a moment to read the letter and share your thoughts in the comments section of this blog post. Please share it with your fellow students. We’d love to add more chapters to the list of supporters!

In addition, the XHTML/CSS version of the open response was designed very minimally so that you can easily adapt it to the needs on your campus. Perhaps you might re-use some of the text for an article in the newspaper? Perhaps it might provide the foundation for a letter to your administration?

There is still time to ensure that Higher Education Act is renewed without language that could hinder the use of technology on college campuses in the U.S.

The movement toward a more free culture has united the strangest assortment of characters. Hip-hop DJs mingle with free software hackers, ivy league lawyers make smalltalk with teenage media activists, kindergarten teachers talk shop with dotcom millionaires. To overground this diversity, I am seeking a statement of your personal vision for a free culture future.

In other words, what does winning look like?

Imagine your life after five successful years working on your free culture projects. How is your day-to-day existence different? What does a city look like? How have the lives of your parents and friends changed? What does it feel like to live in a more free culture? Does it smell different? Sound different?

To contribute to this project, please visit the Developing Vision page on the Free Culture wiki. There you will find space to add your vision.

The submission deadline is on July 11.

Hi Everyone-

My name is Brendan Ballou, and I’m from the Free Culture chapter at Columbia. Some of you may have already heard about EFF’s onion router (Tor, http://tor.eff.org/). Basically Tor is a program that prevents outside parties (your university, your ISP, the RIAA, etc) from tracking your movements on the web (all of it – including file sharing). It’s an incredibly useful tool - one in fact that Chinese dissidents use to keep information from the Chinese government.

Last semester we modified Tor to run only over the Columbia University intranet. Our modified program, the Columbia University Local Area Tor (CU-LATOR) ran much faster than the standard version, and now we want to expand to other universities that participate in Internet2 (to maintain network speed). If you would be interested in having your school participate in this larger, nation-wide uni-tor (we’re working on a name), please email me, because the more schools that participate, the faster the network will run and the safer all our information will be. You don’t need to be a coder to be involved, we just need boots on the ground to help publicize the program and get people to use it. You can check if your school participates in Internet2 here: http://members.internet2.edu/university/universities.cfm

However, if you are a coder we need your help too. Our version of Tor is shaky on windows boxes - so if you’re interested in improving the program for windows email Ron Gejman at rsg2119@columbia.edu.

This is a fun project, and an important one too. We hope we can get your help in keeping students’ data safe and private.

Best,

Brendan Ballou

bcb2114@columbia.edu

On the chapters section of our web site, you’ll now see a dynamically generated map showing the locations of all our chapters, which extend beyond the United States’ borders, reaching places like South America and Africa. I won’t say much more about geographic diversity (since Nelson just discussed the spread of free culture), but I will talk about a subject that doesn’t seem to get enough attention on our blog — the code that runs our site.

As you’ve probably noticed, the interactive map of our chapters is an embedded Google Map, made possible by the fact that Google allows third-party websites to access its maps web service, along with all its features, through an application programming interface (API). Because the Google Maps API is free for virtually anyone to explore and use, all sorts of possibilities emerge for using the technology in creative ways — like displaying criminal activity reported in Chicago, visualizing Craig’s List real estate data, and in our case, showcasing the geographic spread of FreeCulture.org chapters.

Superimposed on our map are markers next to the exact geographic locations of all our FreeCulture.org campuses. Each marker contains the name of the chapter and a link to its website, if it has one. The map allows you to zoom in, making it easier to distinguish individual chapters that are part of large clusters, and zoom out, so you can see some of our international chapters. There are also two dropdown menus — one listing all the US states and the other listing all the countries that have FreeCulture.org chapters — that let you select the area on which you want to zoom in.

What happens behind the scenes is fairly straightforward: whenever someone accesses the chapters page, all the information about the chapters is pulled from a MySQL database, and included in that information are the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the chapter’s school. These coordinates form points on the Google Map,
while basic chapter information (name and link to the chapter’s web site, if there is one) fill up the markers that accompany the points. Since the map itself is displayed with JavaScript code, we use Phoogle Maps, a PHP class that provides a wrapper for the Google Maps API. In pseudocode:

$google_map = new PhoogleMap();
for each $row in the database table with the chapters information
{
  $marker_note = $row['chapter_name'];
  $google_map -> addGeoPoint($row['latitude'], $row['longitude'], $marker_note);
}
$google_map -> printGoogleJS();
$google_map -> showMap();

We’ve stored the latitude and longitude coordinates of the centers of different countries and the 50 US states. When you select a particular region from one of the dropdown menus, the zoom level is changed and the map is centered on the selected region. Again, in pseudocode:

if a $state has been selected
{
  $google_map -> zoomLevel = 12;
  $google_map -> centerMap($state latitude, $state longitude)
}
or if a $country has been selected
{
  $google_map -> zoomLevel = 12;
  $google_map -> centerMap($country latitude, $country longitude)
}

You can see that the code isn’t that complicated, but the end-result is pretty functional. That’s one of the advantages of opening up an API to a web service: interested developers get to flex their creative muscles and come up with some really cool ideas, or at the very least accomplish something that otherwise may have been really difficult to do. Like musical remixes, these mashups of technology often spur a lot of ideas and a lot of innovation.

(By the way, if you have any comments or suggestions about our map, feel free to let us know!)

It’s all very well to be on the cutting edge of the blogging revolution. But what if you fall off that edge? Can you be sued over a blog post? What about your First Amendment rights — do they apply when blogging about your school? Or could you be suspended (or worse) for comments you make on your own time, in your own space?

Luckily for all of us, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together an FAQ on Student Blogging. Now there’s no more wondering about whether you’ve crossed a line. Just consult this roadmap. While you’re at it, take a look at EFF’s other blogging resources.

In addition, you may be interested in the work of the Committee to Protect Bloggers. And, from Reporters Without Borders, another bloggers’ guide (not focused on students).

Enjoy your freedom to blog!

The word pirate gets tossed around a lot in discussion of free culture issues, often by corporations. Recently, the tables turned when a corporation decided to model a new kind of piracy for the world to see. Instead of taking property, or even intangible “intellectual property,” this pirate is taking rights. And it’s doing it under the flag of a EULA, or End User License Agreement.

Let’s recap: First, it was revealed by a private citizen that some of Sony’s music CDs were secretly installing malware on users’ computers. Then, instead of responding with a full apology, explanation, and redress of customer grievances, Sony initially behaved as though it faced a minor p.r. problem, and grudgingly released an uninstall, which some users found hard to access.

Soon it was revealed that although Sony had not mentioned the malware in its EULA, a great deal else was included. The EULA went frighteningly far beyond what users expect, even in this age of digital-rights management.

You might say Sony was sailing its pirate ship into new waters and staking claim. Except those “waters” aren’t new — they’re long-established parts of your territory. The Electronic Frontier Foundation quickly provided a plain-English summary of some of the rights that pirate-Sony tried to assert over you, the paying customer. A few highlights:

1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.

5. Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.

6. The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.

7. If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

This goes far beyond fair compensation or fair anything. Sony is acting like a little kid who is asked what he wants for his birthday and says “Everything!”

Users rebelled. No, Sony, you can’t pirate away our rights to music that we bought and paid for. You can’t have “Everything!” We’re your customers. Remember? Without us, you wouldn’t exist. And Sony pulled back — somewhat. Millions of CDs are being recalled, and the company has apologized.

But has Sony relinquished its piratical tactics for good? Or have they merely taken down the skull-and-crossbones flag and decided to lie low for a few months? The spotlight is on Sony now, but the real test is whether they go back to piracy when nobody’s looking. Bookmark May 2006, and let’s check back then to see if this pirate is still reformed.

Anime Music Videos, or AMVs, are what happens when you take a lot of technically inclined anime fans and let them have music and editing equipment to go with their anime. AMVs are fan-made music videos, sometimes highly artistic. They are audio-video remixes, and this has spawned an entire remix subculture, largely independent of other remix cultures.

AMVs have existed in some form or another for roughly twenty years. For the most part, the anime companies whose video is sampled have been ambivalent, seeing fan-editors as harmless at worst, and both free promotion and a recruiting ground for their own editing projects at best. Anime companies have been known to hire AMV editors to make trailers or DVD extras.

The logic behind the “free promotion” viewpoint is twofold. First, AMVs can and do introduce fans to series they may never have encountered otherwise. A video can show someone just enough to get sufficiently curious to go buy a DVD or two or six. It happens. The second mechanism applies only to editors. What happens here is that an editor sees a sample they want to use, buys the source, and then uses that. Later, rinse, repeat. It’s a free promotional machine for the anime companies.

Actually, the first mechanism applies to all derivative works. When exposed to something new, be it music, video, still art, or writng a person may decide they are curious enough to want more. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often enough to be significant. At some point, money may even be involved. The second mechanism applies specifically to remix subcultures, and it feeds the first by helping to drive the creation of more remixes.

The music industry, until now, has been silent on AMVs. A few bands caught word, here and there. I’m aware of two cases of this offhand, and the band was supportive in both cases. In one case, the band has adopted the video onto their official site (bottom video on the page).

In recent years, a sizable community of editors has formed at AnimeMusicVideos.org, referred to simply as “the Org” by its denizens, including yours truly. The Org is the central website for editors to talk shop and for viewers to download tens of thousands of AMVs. We had hoped the Org would stay free of legal issues, and so far it had.

Well, that time is over. Full details are lacking for the moment, but at some point Wind-Up Records got wind of AMVs using music from Creed, Seether, and Evenescence being hosted on the Org. The result? A Cease and Desist letter. Phade, the founder and head administrator of AnimeMusicVideos.org explains the happenings here.

All is not lost, for the moment. The Org is still running, mostly, although a few videos the lesser for it. Apparently some well-intentioned fan thought to ask the record label if the AMVs they had found were official music videos… oops.

It seems that Wind-Up Records didn’t seriously consider the likelyhood of a backlash. Within hours of this occuring, a backlash is already starting:

Well, I am taking my recently purchaced Seether album back to the store, and I was considering buying Evanescense, but It seems I have changed my mind.