The evidence for the Crimson’s claim is shaky, based largely on two sweeping claims about intellectual property. The Crimson states as common sense that without an effective intellectual property regime, there will be no incentive for innovation.

But around the world there are well documented examples of innovation and creativity that function in the absence of strong copyright protection: the world’s second largest movie industry, in Nigeria, and the booming “techno brega” scene in Brazil were both documented in the documentary “Good Copy Bad Copy,” which is available for free online. And that’s to say nothing of all of the innovations that took place before the mid-1700s, the works of Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and all the others that lived before modern copyright was developed. Lastly, enormous areas of creativity like fashion, cooking, comedy, and even magic tricks operate without copyright protection. Closer to home, the entire academic publishing system functions without authors retaining copyright for their works, instead exchanging their monopoly for the opportunity to publish. Copyright can certainly provide a motivation for entrepreneurs to create, but in light of these examples, The Crimson’s statement that the absence of IP laws would eliminate innovation seems unjustifiable.

The second overbroad claim in the editorial pertains to a concept called “moral rights.” “Intellectual property rights are important,” according to the Crimson, “because each person has a fundamental right to enjoy the fruits of his or her mental labor.” The fact is that that justification is not uncommon in parts of the world, but has no basis in American law. The Constitutional “copyright clause,” in fact, is the only right enumerated in the Constitution with an explicit purpose, and that purpose is incentivization: Congress may secure monopolies for creators in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” No less than Thomas Jefferson was uncomfortable with the “embarrassment” of monopolies, but conceded that as an incentive, they might be worthwhile. As a fundamental moral right? He never even considered it.

Finally, the editorial talks about the concept of “balance,” and then gets into a discussion of business models, debating whether the ones that exist today are convenient enough to remove the justification for piracy. This discussion is an interesting one, and has a place elsewhere, but let’s not confuse an economic argument with an ideological one. In the world’s premiere institution of higher learning—and truly, in any institution of higher learning—the balance isn’t a question of business models. Should Harvard University, at the urging of a media industry that presumes the students to be criminals, reduce the flow of information available to them?

The MPAA and similar organizations are comfortable to disregard the educational benefits that technology has brought us and to see the Harvard student body as a group of potential criminal freeloaders. One can sympathize with members of the movie industry which, in spite of consistently breaking annual box office records, purports to be having a hard time. And it’s certainly reasonable for a university to discuss what the legal and technical guidelines of its network ought to be. But it’s wrong to kowtow to the demands of a media industry at the cost of Harvard students’ technological autonomy.

Numerous stakeholders, watchdogs, and industry analysts have already commented on yesterday’s public disagreement between Comcast and Level 3 Communications. It’s a fascinating dispute regarding the bizarre world of “peering” agreements.

On the ride to school today, I was disappointed to hear Marketplace cover the story without even mentioning “net neutrality” or the “open internet”.

Below is the letter to the editor I sent this afternoon. Please feel free to comment, cannibalize, or re-send as your own. We need news organizations to do a better job accurately covering issues of internet freedom.

Dear Marketplace,

You missed an opportunity to cover the bigger implications of Level 3′s public complaint against Comcast this morning. Beyond immediate concerns over streaming video, the outcome of this dispute may fundamentally change the open nature of the internet. Users depend on peering agreements among countless intermediary ISPs when they access web services. We may never know the extent to which Level 3 traffic is overwhelming Comcast’s network but their unavoidable conflict of interest demonstrates a profound inability to self-regulate.

Members of Students for Free Culture include tomorrow’s internet users, developers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs. We depend on Marketplace for its critical coverage of the tech industry. Rather than focus on fees for Netflix subscribers, this story sorely needed discussion of the FCC’s struggle with “net neutrality” and Comcast’s pending acquisition of NBC/Universal.

Looking forward to further coverage as the negotiations develop!

Sincerely,

Kevin Driscoll
Students for Free Culture
University of Southern California

Want further reading? Here are some tabs:

• Level 3 press release regarding new fees from Comcast
• Comcast responds on its blog, customers sound off in the comments
• GigaOM Comcast/Level 3 timeline
• Save the Internet lists 7 recent examples of Comcast’s bad behavior
• Public Knowledge calls this a “third strike” against Comcast
• Stop Big Media describes this as Comcast being “caught red-handed”

Good Morning to All sheet music

Today, after a series of mergers and acquisitions the Warner Music Group claims copyright on HBTY, and current law states it will remain rightful owner in the U.S. Until 2030. This assertion is contested in detail by Professor Robert Brauneis in his paper Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song. In spite of common belief that it remains under copyright, Braunies’ archival research indicates that HBTY may actual be a public domain work. By recapping his arguments (after the jump), I hope to help other artists understand the importance of documentation and proper registration of works should they seek to obtain copyright protection – as well as to consider problems that can arise from the continued extension of copyright term limits and in turn, the estate-based control of past works. Lastly, I’d like readers to become more aware of the general contributions made by Patty and Mildred Hill to the respective fields of education and musicology.

For the purpose of clarity we first require a set of definitions and to understand there are 3 layers of copyright in this case. (1) The melody in GMTA is one work, subject to it’s own copyright; (2) the words “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear (celebrant name), happy birthday to you” is another work who’s author is, I argue, unknown despite the existence of two seemingly obvious candidates. Brauneis refers to the combination of these works as (3) GMTA/HBTY, which as a derivative work, is subject to its own copyright. To understand why Warner Music Group’s claim on Happy Birthday to You may be invalid, we have to trace back the history of the GMTA/HBTY combination; it’s where the $ is.

In 1893 Mildred and Patty began work on Song Stories for the Kindergarten, a songbook which providing children with expressive, emotional music of quality. The Hills adapted Mildred’s original melodies (such as GMTA) to fit the limited singing range of young children. Her drafts, equipped with easy and repetitive intervals, were brought into the classroom, tested, and then later modified as needed so that even the youngest kids could participate. Over the next years Mildred would focus on the study of African-American hymnals and spirituals while Patty advanced her studies in early childhood education.

Beginners' Book of Songs

Around or prior to 1912, birthday parties had come fully into vogue with the masses. Assisting in the celebrations, companies like Cable Company (Chicago) began producing unauthorized printings of sheet music – the melody of GMTA with the lyrics changed to HBTY. Its possible the Hills were unaware of these printings, but if they were we might assume from their lack of legal action that full recognition of HBTY’s massive market potential was still a few years off. On June 5th 1916 Mildred Hill passed away and her sister, Jessica Hill inherited a 1/5th interest in the renewal rights to Song Stories for the Kindergarten. In 1921 she filed a timely renewal on that claim with the copyright office.

Clearly the Hill family had a solid general understanding of copyright matters. Two examples will exemplify that fact. Patty Hill, according to first-hand accounts, attended a production of As Thousands Cheer produced by Sam H. Harris Theatrical Enterprises. During a birthday celebration scene, actors sung the lyrics of HBTY to the tune of GMTA, which (whether she was “enraged” or not) lead to accusations of copyright infringement by Jessica Hill who sued the theatrical group in the case of Hill v. Harris in August 1934. (view complaint)

Later that year (December 29th 1934) permission to use the GMTA melody was granted by Jessica Hill to the Clayton F. Summy Co., who began printing collections of sheet music containing the GTMA/HBTY combination. Clayton F. Summy then filed for copyright on 6 arrangements of the work, of which 4 were instrumental and 2 included GMTA/HBTY. The two arrangements with words were credited to Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman respectivly, as employees of the Clayton F. Summy Co. Orem’s claim was for “Arrangement as easy piano solo, with text.” Forman’s was on arrangement and “revised text” which consisted of this additional verse: “May your birthday be bright, full of cheer and delight.” A nice verse but, commercially insignificant today due to infrequency of use. (view original application)

In the interest of time, we’re going to fast forward now to 1958, after Summy F. Clayton Co. had been sold to the Sengstack family and was now run by David Sengstack, who merged with C.C. Birchard Company to create Summy-Birchard Co. This company published several collections which included GTMA/HBTY, and with much variation in accreditation. Hill-Wilson, Hill-Dahnert, “traditional”, and Patty (Patti) & Mildred Hill at one time or another all got props in the credit mix – a curious state of confusion when we consider that by the 1940s GMTA/HBTY was earning approx $15k-$20k per year in licensing fees.

Summy-Birchard's approved renewal

In 1962, licensing revenues were nearly $50k/year and in an effort to protect that cash flow, Summy-Birchard Co. filed for and successfully renewed their claim. Here we find problem one: the renewal mirrored exactly the 1934 registrations, with the exception of updating the Clayton F. Summy name to Summy-Birchard Co. The 1909 Copyright Act stated that the original term of copyright was obtained by publication via proper notice. Registration was not necessary during initial terms, but it was necessary for renewal. If the work sought to be renewed had not been previously registered, applicants could submit both an original registration & renewal at the same time, along with the deposit copies of the work being renewed. Summy-Birchard Co. never submitted an original registration for the GMTA/HBTY combination. No one has.

In other words, the 1962 renewal is valid regarding the Orem & Forman arrangements (piano solo, extra words) but not lay a specific claim on the GMTA/HBTY combination. Assume for the sake or argument that Summy-Birchard’s renewal was found to be valid – that the lack of original registration was simply a paperwork error or something we can blame on an intern. Summy-Birchard Co. would still need to prove its 1934 registration of GMTA/HBTY was valid to begin with.

Back in October 1942 the case of The Hill Foundation, Inc v. Clayton F. Summy Co. parties disuputed whether Jessica Hill has previously assigned copyright of Song Stories for the Kindergarten to Clayton F. Summy, or merely assigned it for limited-run printings. When we consider that in Hill v. Harris, the Hills were trying to assert and protect their copyright, I find it highly suspect they would have assigned rights away to Clayton F. Summy. During litigation, Clayton Summy Co. obtained a 1/8th interest in Song Stories for the Kindergarten through other legal, if not slightly sneaky means.

One William Hill had an interest in Song Stories for the Kindergarten through inheritance. He died in 1934, named his wife Corinne executrix of his estate, she died in 1939, and executrix to her estate, Leo B. Lowenthal then curiously petitioned the Probate Court of Cook County, Illinois to have himself withdraw from that representation & to have the court appoint one Allen Davy. This Davy fellow approved an inventory of the estate at the shockingly low figure of $15. He then persuaded the court to hold a private sale in which the inventory was sold to Clayton F. Summy for $25.00. Clayton F. Summy argued that it had an interest in GMTA/HBTY as a previously unpublished work from the estate. However no mention of, and in turn no transfer of unpublished works actually took place! Giving Clayon F. Summy the full benefit of the doubt here, let’s look at the issue of whether the Hill’s actually authored GMTA/HBTY to begin with.

Hill v. Harris testimony

Back in Hill v. Harris Patty delivered some testimony that causes serious doubt on the Hills’ claim of authorship and in turn, Clayton F. Summy’s claim of copyright interest. Patty stated (1) that she wrote words for the published version of GMTA (as asingle verse, which did not include HBTY lyrics), (2) that she, or she and Mildred, wrote “many other verses” to GMTA; and (3) that the HBTA words were “used” at school celebrations. She stops short of claiming she specifically “wrote” HBTY. So with Clayton F. Summy unable to prove an interest in renewal and the Hills unable to prove original authorship, the case of The Hill Foundation v. Clayton F. Summy was settled out of court and both parties shared licensing profits.

To recap: due to Summy-Birchard Co.’s failure to properly renew in 1962, GMTA/HBTY would have entered the public domain. If this failure were to be dismissed as an excusable accident, we are still absent any document which proves beyond doubt that Mildred and or Patty Hill, the most plausible authors of the GMTY/HBTA combination, actually wrote it. Absent that proof, WMG only has an interest in the additional copyright matter (piano solo and 2nd verse) registered to Orem & Forman in 1934. While valid, those are separate matters from the GMTA/HBTY combination. A rote, uncreative variation on the earlier work can not be registered as a derivative; there has to be some added originality or editorial insight. The GMTA/HBTY as we know it today appeared regularly in print prior to the 1930s. Neither Orem or Forman’s mostly forgotten additions had any impact on it’s market potential. I believe GMTA/HBTY or simply Happy Birthday to You is currently a public domain work. While this might be the end of the legal story, there’s still for me, a moral complication.

The Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) was first established in 1892 as the International Kindergarten Union. Co-founded by Patty Smith Hill, their primary efforts were to better the professional preparation of kindergarten teachers. Today the ACEI partners with organizations such as the United Nations and UNICEF to “promote and support…the optimal education and development of children…and to influence the professional growth of educators and the efforts of others who are committed to the needs of children in a changing society.” Seems like something I’d donate to; maybe even score a mug or tote bag in the deal.

Back when The Hill Foundation, Inc v. Clayton F. Summy settled out of court, an affidavit by Hill-trust trustee Alvin J. Burnett stated all rights in Good Morning to All & Happy Birthday to You were then assigned to the Clayton F. Summy Company in 1944 in return for a one-third share of future revenues. Years later in 1985, a lawyer for Summy-Birchard stated “performance proceeds from Happy Birthday to You bring two ‘low six-figure” checks each year to Summy-Birchard and the Hill Foundation.” Royalties rights were passed from the Hill Foundation to the ACEI who’s annual IRS Form 990′s state that for the years 2004, 2005, and 2006, royalty income was $584, 352; $631,866; & $738,510 respectively. $1,954,728.00 in 3 years is no small slice of pie for a non-profit, but its eligibility is called into question by the very case made against Warner Music Group.

A young Patty Hill

As an aside, I suggest reading Agnes Snyder’s 1972 paper for the ACEI, Dauntless Women in Childhood Education. In it, Snyder paints a picture of Patty Hill as a strong, dedicated intellectual who rose from a humble background to become one of the most important voices speaking on behalf of progressive early childhood education in America. After reading it, I became even more convinced the Hill sisters didn’t pen the GMTA/HBTY combination. In all aspects of their professional careers they were articulate and exact. While perhaps it’s not court-worthy evidence, it becomes hard to imagine GMTA/HBTY would have simply slipped through the cracks while their other works received protection through proper notice and registration. It seems more the case that the Hill’s felt entitled to rights due to HBTY’s similarity to GMTA; and as much as I’ve come to respect the Hills I’d stick to the argument that similarity isn’t enough to claim authorship.

I’ll close by humbly pointing out that I am an artist known for making typos, not a lawyer. I believe I’ve presented the general argument correctly but with speed, and suggest readers view both Braunies’ paper and beautiful collection of supporting documents.  If there is a counter-argument, let it be presented scholarly! One thing is for sure, the story of GMTA/HBTY is far from the standard folk-tale. It is a story where the push for participatory culture, pioneering women in education, early studies in African-American musicology, and copyright come together. It leaves us with a looming dilemma: Do we call for a full investigation of the copyright status of Happy Birthday to You with knowledge that its recognition as a public domain work would result in the loss of a major funding source for the ACEI; or does the public find the current arrangement agreeable, in which potentially illegally collected royalties are shared so that 1/3 goes to a respected non-profit and 2/3 goes to the Warner Music Group?

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song
Brauneis’ supporting documents
Association for Childhood Education International
Dauntless Women in Childhood Education Buy / PDF

Mark your calendars! The next Students for Free Culture conference will be held on February 19-20, 2011, in New York City! Start thinking about travel plans and funding now!

To get involved with planning the conference, join the conf11 listserv. (Need help subscribing? See the FAQ.)

The hashtag for the conference is #sfcnyc. Feel free to start tracking it and using it on twitter / identica.

Also, our current t-shirts are fantastic (see above), but we all kinda want to make some new ones, too. This is a call for t-shirt designs. Have a cool idea? Design away and send your idea to board-at-freeculture.org so we can look into getting them printed up!

Currently I feel we are working independently. I think this is not the best approach. Chapters should be collaborating with each other. Sharing ideas and planning activities together. Telling everyone else what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

This is very helpful for many reasons. First, for already established chapters, it’s a way to organize new activities. We can copy and remix what others have done. For new chapters, it is invaluable information. It shows them what we are doing, what they can do too. We have already prepared a chapter kick starter, Year One, but more information is always better.

I also believe this speeds up the planning of activities. For example, if I plan a FOSS Gaming Night for FC@UPRM, I need to prepare a flier to post in the bulletin boards around campus. But, if a chapter decides to host a gaming night as well, or something very similar, they shouldn’t need to make a whole new flier. They should be able to use the same flier/art a chapter already used. It’s only a matter of changing some text and, perhaps, a little bit of remixing. It’s the model we support and sponsor, a bottom-up way of making things. Like Newton once said “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

This is not a new idea. I know there are a couple fliers somewhere in the wiki, but I have no idea where they are, and that’s a problem. There should be a centralized place for all this, and something that is chapter friendly. The wiki can be a good place, but it’s currently more like a labyrinth. Perhaps a couple people from various chapters can join the webteam and do something together. I recently joined the webteam and I’m ready to work on this. Who’s with me?

• The creation of a new mailing list for chapters. Think of it like chapter news. We tell each other what we are doing. It might be short and sweet. Something like “We are talking about ACTA next Thursday.”  Or better yet, attached to the message is some art for the activity.
  • UPDATE: Well, this mailing list exists. I had no idea about it. I don’t know if I’m the only one that didn’t know about it, but, let use that. It already exists here.
• A centralized place for fliers. Something that’s organized and usable.
• Meeting in IRC. I miss the days when chapters would have meetings in IRC. These were planned meetings, not just “Hey Sparragus, what’s up? How’s FC@UPRM doing?” It would also be awesome if the board attended the meetings, too.
• Blogging more! We should be blogging more. In the SFC website, under chapter news, I always see a couple posts every other month. This is great. However, I would love to see more, and specially from more chapters. Blog once for every activity you have. And this is not necessarily blogging for SFC, but blogging for our members, our university, and for the world. We need to make sure the name of Students for Free Culture stands up high, and so does our chapters. Blogging is the easiest and quickest solution for this. Once again, it’s a great way to know what others are doing.

Let’s start conversing with each other! I would love to hear your thoughts on this. What should we do and how should we do it?

See ya all around!

Whether through ignorance or hubris, Facebook has angered many of its users over the last couple of years. No doubt readers of this blog are among them. In a wonderfully reflective blog post, Parker Higgins outlines six principles guiding his reluctant return to Facebook:

• Remember that Facebook is not your friend
• Keep on top of Facebook’s changes
• Manage all your data
• Diversify your services
• Fight for changes
• Support alternatives

Have you been thinking about ending or altering the terms of your relationship to Facebook? What would you add to his list? What challenges have you faced?

Don’t miss Parker’s full blog post here: Using Facebook responsibly.

It’s our pleasure to introduce the five members of the board:

• 
  Kevin Driscoll
  Kevin is the most senior member of the board, having served two prior terms. This month, he will finish his first year as a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in the University of Southern California.

• 
  Andrea Fassina
  Andrea is currently in his third year of study doing a Master in Electronics at the University of York in England. Andrea recently started a chapter at U of York, and is leading an effort to bring SFC to the UK.

• 
  Adi Kamdar
  Adi is a rising junior at Yale University, where he is pursuing a Science, Technology, and Society major. He initiated the Yale chapter of SFC, which has garnered national attention for several of its campaigns. He is an undergraduate fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and will be working at the Berkman Center this summer.

• 
  Parker Phinney
  Parker is a rising junior at Dartmouth, majoring in Computer Science. Parker has founded two SFC chapters (one at his high school and another at Dartmouth), and has led the freeculture.org web team. He interned at Creative Commons last summer and worked this past Winter with SFC alumni on OpenHatch.org.

• 
  Aditi Rajaram
  Aditi is a rising senior at NYU, double majoring in Journalism and Political Science. She has served as Secretary and Vice President of Free Culture @ NYU, and will be serving as President next year.

Special advisors
2009-2010 board members Kevin Donovan and Ben Moskowitz will stay with SFC leadership as special advisors to the board of directors.

Next steps
Please keep an eye out, or join our discussion list, as we share the next steps for SFC and its expansion in the 2010-2011 school year! If you are interested in starting a chapter, or supporting the organization, please be in touch with board@freeculture.org.

Pat Aufderheide, University Professor @ American University; Director, Center for Social Media

Professor Aufderheide examines the effects of the law on artists and the public interest. She is the author of Communications Policy in the Public Interest and Documentary: A Very Short Introduction. In recent years, she has promoted fair use through a series of important best practice guides for various industries. She is closely tied to the artistic community through past and present positions with Kartemquin Films, Sundance Film Festival, and Independent Television Service. Her tweets are here.

Wendy Seltzer, Fellow, Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship; Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Wendy Seltzer has played an influential role in promoting freedom in the digital world for more than a decade. She has taught courses on the intersection of technology, commerce, and law at American University, Oxford, Brooklyn Law School and Northeastern. As the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse she brought attention to the unfounded legal threats dampening free speech online. She serves on the board of the Tor Project to support privacy online and on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation to advance the web for human empowerment. Her prolific activities are chronicled on her Twitter account here.

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law @ Duke Law School; Co-founder, Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Professor Boyle is a teacher and writer studying the rising conflict between the intellectual ecology of the public domain and the movement that seeks to enclose it through private means. His books include The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind and Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society. Additionally, he co-founded both Science Commons and ccLearn to bring the work of Creative Commons to the specific domains of science and education. He is a frequent commentator in the media, notably through his regular FT column. The blog for his most recent book is here.

Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts @ the University of Southern California;

Professor Jenkins moved to USC in 2009 after a decade as the Director of MIT’s influential Comparative Media Studies program. He has written or edited twelve books that examine media, culture and the interplay between creators and consumers, such as Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He is a highly-respected researcher, receiving grants from the MacArthur Foundation and testifying before the American government. His blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, is available here.

[Aufderheide photo licensed CC BY by (fittingly) Wendy Seltzer; Seltzer photo licensed CC BY-NC-SA by foxgrrl; Jenkins photo licensed CC BY by deneyterrio.]

Details:
Sunday, May 9th at 9 PM EST (GMT -5)
irc.freenode.net
#freeculture

For help with IRC, visit http://wiki.freeculture.org/IRC

To see the nominees for the 2010-2011 board of directors, visit http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board10/Nominations

Our friends at Public Knowledge write to let us know that they have a new job opening that would be a great opportunity for a recently graduated student excited about promoting free culture.

“The Web Content and New Media Associate will work with Public Knowledge (PK) outreach and legal staff to ensure that PK’s website is regularly updated, relevant, timely and widely dispersed through the use of social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube). Public Knowledge is a growing, internationally prominent consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. that works to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.”

The job is an opportunity to promote free culture through “translating” legal issues into layperson’s terms, generating content for the general public, and assisting in the planning of public events and initiatives (such as their successful World’s Fair Use Day). PK is looking for a college graduate with a passion for technology, public policy, media reform and activism. Candidates should have strong communications skills, be a quick learner and able to produce high-quality results on tight deadlines. Basic web design (HTML/CSS), graphic design, video production, social media, Drupal, and web activism experience is a plus. Compensation is competitive with excellent benefits and opportunities for professional growth.

It’s a great time to be in D.C. so interested candidates should provide a cover letter, resume, and writing sample of less than 1,000 words to Mehan Jayasuriya (mehan [at] publicknowledge [dot] org).

The flyer is available here.

Head over to the Nominations page to nominate someone you think will help advance the organization in 2010-2011. Candidates must accept nomination and offer biographical details no later than April 30.

Between April 30 and May 10, candidates will answer questions from the community and participate in one live Q/A session.

Chapters will receive e-vote tokens by email on Monday, May 10th, and must cast their votes by Friday, May 14. The results will be announced on Monday, May 17th.

1. The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is the Executive Branch’s agency tasked with addressing telecommunications and information policy. Their work has been highlighted in recent months through the Broadband Grants program and the recent speech by Larry Strickling calling for Internet Policy 3.0. They are seeking interns for both the summer and during the school year and if you are interested, get in touch with Christopher Hemmerlein who coordinates their program [chemmerlein (at) ntia (d0t) doc (dot) gov]. Please note that they can only consider American citizens.
2. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the UN agency that focused on the global IP regime. In recent years, they have been at the center for discussions over copyright exceptions and limitations and the Treaty for the Blind. The new division of economic research at WIPO is offering a couple internships to PhD or otherwise qualified students who are interested in spending 3-6 months in Geneva. Completed applications can be submitted to staff (dot) engagements (at) wipo (dot) int [cc: sasch (dot) wunsch-vincent (at) wipo (dot) int].

These should be great opportunities to learn about the policy work of issues SFC cares about. If you have any other internships ideas, be sure to get in touch.

Use this as an opportunity to convene a discussion, or start a workshop, or get your group off the ground!

Lessig’s talk will explore copyright in a digital age, and the importance of a doctrine like fair use. Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage creative expression and political participation, not just passive consumption.

If you want to host your own screening, fill out the form at http://openvideoalliance.org/event/lessig-registration/. Small grants are available to pay facilities fees, refreshments, or materials. If you have questions or comments, or if you’d like to get more information about hosting your own event, you can contact the event organizers at conference@openvideoalliance.org.

Give a dollar, $25, $100—it’s up to you. 100% of the proceeds will fund future Students for Free Culture projects. To sweeten the deal for you, we’re announcing some cool gifts:

•If you register at $50 or more, get a DVD with the complete Free Culture 2008 videos archive

•If you register at $75 or more, get a signed copy of one of these books:

• Remix by Lawrence Lessig OR
• Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

•If you register at $100 or more, get one of these badges of coolness:

• a yourname@freeculture.org email address OR
• a custom answering machine greeting by none other than cyberscholar Jonathan Zittrain

Just register by February 9th at your chosen level and we’ll contact you to get your gift preferences. Gifts are cumulative, so if you register at $100 or more you get a DVD, a signed book, and a badge of coolness. Gifts apply to all previous registrations, too.

Questions? Email board@freeculture.org.

Last Wednesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a Request for Information on the issue of Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Executive action stemming from this RFI could potentially open all federally funded science research to the public for free online access.

This has the exciting potential to greatly advance the goals of your Open Education Campaign. Not only could the more than $60 billion in research the US government funds annually be made available to all, but the government would also be endorsing openness as an academic ideal, sending a strong signal to publishers, universities, and various other stakeholders that this is the new standard.

With all the work Students for Free Culture has done on the issue of expanding access to educational materials, you are in a unique position to appreciate the tremendous impact executive action could have. Opening up all federally funded research to every student in the country (and world) would break down strong barriers to access that currently force students to settle for the materials their library can afford rather than what they truly need. A student’s education should be limited only by curiosity rather than the rapidly escalating journal prices that put the complete scholarly record out of reach for students at all but the most well funded institutions.

So what can you do to make public access a reality? The answer is that you can do a lot.

• First, you can take the time to respond to the questions in the RFI (the full text can be found at here) by submitting a comment to the Federal Register by January 7th (email comments to publicaccess-at-ostp-dot-gov).
• Second, there is a rotating set of questions on the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog which changes every ten days – you can respond thoughtfully to the questions as well as other people’s comments right in the comment section of the blog (the first round ends December 20th, so don’t wait!).
• Finally, you can encourage other students and advocates to comment as well.

A strong student response in favor of a mandatory public access policy will truly help ensure that such a policy becomes a reality and that it follows SFC’s ideals of openness as closely as possible. I can’t wait to see the impact students make on this groundbreaking process and look forward to your responses!

Nick Shockey
Director of Student Advocacy, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

If you’re a student leader, now is the time to seek travel funding from your schools and departments. You’d be surprised to learn how much support is available for you to represent your school at an international conference. Consult with your professors, counselors, and department heads to find out about grant opportunities.

We will be working hard to secure travel funding for representatives from SFC chapters to attend the conference. But we can’t guarantee funding, so ask around! Contact us if you need an invitation letter or any other support.

If you’re interested in volunteering, we now have a collaborative mailing list. We’ll use the list in the day-to-day coordination of the conference, up to and after the event. Sign up here.

Stay tuned for more updates. To stay in touch, consider following us on Twitter/identi.ca or subscribing to our RSS feed.

For only $20 (+S&H), you get a really high-quality shirt designed by Patrick Moberg and made by American Apparel. Mine (the colorful copyleft one) has been a great conversation starter for people who otherwise would not be at all familiar with the work we do with Students for Free Culture.

So, help promote free culture by purchasing one of the Students for Free Culture shirts!

About the Open University Campaign

In October 2008, Students for Free Culture drafted and adopted the Wheeler Declaration which declared that:

“An open university is one in which:

1. The research produced is open access;
2. The course materials are open educational resources;
3. The university embraces free software and open standards;
4. The university’s patents are readily licensed for free software, essential medicine, and the public good;
5. The university’s network reflects the open nature of the Internet,

where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty and administration.”

Out of this agreement has grown the Open University Campaign, of which a major goal is to produce objective, reliable indicators of individual universities’ levels of openness. A primary method through which this will be accomplished is through “report card” style profiles of leading institution of higher learning, similar to College Sustainability Report Cards. Students for Free Culture has already begun this work by defining principles of measurement, researching available resources, and developing surveys to be distributed to universities.

What Will the Open University Report Cards Entail?

Mirroring the Wheeler Declaration, the Open University Report Cards, as currently envisioned, will evaluate schools on five topics:

1. Open Access: Are faculty required to make their scholarship open access? Is the university press publish open access materials?
2. Open Educational Resources: Does the university create OERs? Does the university use OERs?
3. Free and Open Source Software and Standards: Does university computing use FOSS? Are students and faculty required to use proprietary software?
4. Intellectual Property: Is IP revenue transparent? Is IP used to promote innovation, or restrict knowledge?
5. Network Management: Is the network neutral? Is user privacy respected?

Establishing credible criteria under which schools will be assessed will be essential to creating a respected resource. For example, Which schools’ open access policies are currently lacking important criteria? Or, To what extent should a school actively support FOSS? The volunteers currently involved with the project are working through these questions on the wiki page, and we encourage you to join the conversation.

What the Open University Campaign Needs

In order to make this a successful endeavor, Students for Free Culture needs your involvement!

• Are you a student who can research official university open access policies?
• Are you passionate about FOSS and can develop a questionnaire for IT administrators about FOSS policy?
• Are you statistically-inclined and can handle data on universities?
• Are you a web developer who could create a public website for the Open University Report Cards?
• Are you a graphic designer who could create posters to raise awareness on campuses?

In Closing…

The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.

Join us by jumping into the wiki, signing up for the Open University mailing list, or emailing board (at) freeculture (dot) org with suggestions or questions!

The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette, a copy of Final Cut Studio, and an iPod Nano. The Runner Up and People’s Choice Award winners will each receive $500 cool ones.

Check out some previous years’ winners:

GrowUp from SPARC on Vimeo.

Brighter from SPARC on Vimeo.

Entries in the international Sparky Awards competition must be received before December 6, 2009. To be eligible, videos must be freely available on the Internet and available for use under a Creative Commons License.

The 2009 Sparky Awards are sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Campus MovieFest, Penn Libraries, Students for Free Culture, and the Student PIRGs, and organized by SPARC. For details on the contest and tips on organizing a local competition, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org . For details on the contest and tips on organizing a local competition, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org .

In this guest post, Ryan Radia, an information policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that the privacy concerns raised by the settlement are not convincing.

Wonder why practically every student today uses Gmail, YouTube, or some other Google service? Chances are it’s because they’re free. Designing and running these services, however, is not.

So how does Google make enough money to fund its services when it doesn’t charge the vast majority of its users? Simple: Advertising, which accounts for 99% of Google’s revenue.

Online ads can be annoying – we’ve all encountered obtrusive pop-ups – but they play a crucial role in online commerce. In 2008, advertisers spent over $23 billion on Web ads. It’s no secret why so many firms buy ads – done properly, advertising can build brand reputation, spur sales, and inform potential customers. But perhaps the best part about advertising is that it sustains free Web services.

Google Book Search is no exception. While Google would sell digital books under the proposed settlement it’s reached with authors and publishers, advertising would still likely generate a large share of revenue for Google Books.

This is great news for authors and readers alike. Authors would earn the majority of ad revenues (63%, according to the latest version of the settlement). Users would also benefit, because the Google Book deal would allow anybody in the U.S. to freely search and browse tens of millions of currently unavailable books.

Yet not everyone is happy about the deal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, and others have called for strict limits on the data Google may collect from Book Search users. The groups argue that storing detailed information about what books individuals read and purchase would violate readers’ privacy.

These groups forget that data collection and strong privacy protections can and do coexist. Amazon’s Kindle, a portable reading device that has sold millions of digital books, stores extensive data on its users. ACLU and EFF haven’t identified a single actual harm that’s resulted from a breach involving Kindle, or any other digital book service for that matter.

Google’s business depends on user trust, so it has a huge incentive to keep user data as safe as possible.

Google’s critics should turn their attention to the real privacy threat: Government. To date, courts have refused to apply Fourth Amendment protections to data stored with “cloud” services like Google’s. Thus, a mere subpoena – civil or criminal – is all it takes to force Google to disclose user information to the feds.

ACLU and EFF argue that limiting Google’s data collection reduces the chances that courts will get a hold of personal data. Fair enough. But limiting data collection has serious downsides. Without individualized data, advertisers cannot target ads, meaning users are far more likely to see “dumb” ads. Because users don’t click on these ads as often, advertisers earn less revenue, and authors earn less money. Worse, dumb ads undercut Google’s revenue, reducing its incentive to invest in scanning orphan works.

Limiting government’s power to obtain personal data is a far better solution to privacy concerns than saddling Google with onerous data collection limits.

For its part, Google could help further privacy without endangering advertising by disclosing how many “enforceable requests” for user data it receives, and explaining how it decides whether to challenge court orders that demand user information.

Moreover, concerned users can always adopt privacy-enhancing technologies that protect anonymity and limit data collection on an individualized basis. And traditional libraries, which offer strong privacy protections, aren’t going anywhere.

But let’s not forget that the real privacy violator is the government, not Google.

– Ryan Radia

Previous Posts in This Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL
• Ed Van Gemert of UW-Wisconsin
• Jason Schultz of UC Berkeley

In this guest post, Jason Schultz, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, examines the academic implications of poor privacy.

I’ve never seen my students more depressed than the moment they walk about of the campus bookstore. Instead of inspiration and glee, they often look like Quasimoto, the famous hunchback — dragging their bags full of thick clunky tomes behind them and bemoaning the huge hit they just took in their wallets. This is especially true today, as monumental budget cuts have driven up tuition at state universities like UC Berkeley to unprecedented heights. The cost of a college education has never been more daunting or its debt more long-lasting.

Enter Google Book Search (GBS), the half-decade-old scanning project by the popular search company in Mountain View. With GBS, the promise of affordable modern access to textbooks is at your fingertips. For example, if an academic publisher is part of Google’s Publisher Program, a large or small portion of the book may already be available depending on the publisher’s permissions. However, for other books that are still under copyright, Google will only display snippets — small 8-12 line “samples” of text that highlight what the viewer is searching for. Still, if you find a snippet that sounds good, you can often order the book via library or bookstore through a link on the side of the page.

Despite the limited size of these snippets, Google has been involved in a copyright lawsuit over its Book Search project that has now come to a head with a gigantic and important Settlement Agreement. The original lawsuit mostly concerned Google’s scanning, indexing, and snippet displays and whether or not those were copyright infringements or “fair use” of the books. The Settlement, however, covers many, many issues — open access, disability and civil rights, competition issues, metadata accuracy, and fair use just to name a few — too many to describe in a single blog post. However, I do want to highlight one of the key issues — privacy. You can check out other issues here.

When it comes to book privacy, it is important to think about it in the context of what many academics and activists call The Chilling Effect. Think about it. If you go to a library or a book store most days, you can walk around and browse fairly anonymously. If you decide you want to take a sneak peak at the somewhat embarrassing new Twilight novel, most people will never know. Or say you have a more serious concern, such as HIV or domestic violence. The privacy in physical libraries allows you to explore and understand important issues, either personally or for research and educational purposes. This privacy even extends to what you buy or check out — almost all libraries and bookstores protect these records from access by third parties as vehemently as possible. (For example, the American Library Association Code of Ethics specifically commits every librarian to protecting patron privacy.).

So the question for Google, and for the Settlement, is what kind of privacy protections will GBS offer? Well, the Settlement Agreement doesn’t say. It’s entirely silent on the issue of reader privacy. To their credit, Google has taken this concern quite seriously outside the Settlement, even going so far as to post a proposed Privacy Policy and make several comments on their blog. Yet concerns remain. For instance, despite Google’s assurances that they “take our privacy commitments to our users very seriously[,]” there are open questions about how much information they will collect on readers who use GBS, whether that information will be used in conjunction with other Google Services (such as its advertising services), how long they will keep the information, and under what circumstances they will disclose it to third parties, such as the government or those involved in civil lawsuits. These concerns are very real, as we have seen examples of subpoenas for book information in the past here, here, and here.

Moreover, there is also a concern about Google changing its mind in the future. If the settlement is approved (the Judge in the case will hold a hearing on October 7, 2009 to consider the matter), there is nothing that prevents Google from deciding at some future date to offer less privacy to readers. Locking Google into privacy as part of the Settlement ensures that readers are protected now and in the future. (I should note that I helped file a brief asking the Judge to do just that on behalf on a group of authors and publishers who share this concern.)

In sum, GBS is an amazing new opportunity to access information from books. There is no doubt about that. And the Settlement provides unprecedented additional opportunities for students to read. However, it is important to keep in mind the trade-offs that GBS and the Settlement offer and to make sure that the balance is positive before we whole-heartedly endorse this dramatic change in the future of the way we read, learn, and share information. For every student reading this, it is your future that is at stake, so pay attention. This is one test that may well be part of your permanent record for years to come.

– Jason Schultz

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL
• Ed Van Gemert of UW-Wisconsin

In this guest post, Brandon C. Butler, Law and Policy Fellow at the Association of Research Libraries, addresses the settlement in the context of institutional equality and intellectual freedom.

First, we would like to thank Students for Free Culture for inviting us to share our thoughts on this important issue. The Association of Research Libraries has followed the Google Books litigation closely, and filed Comments with the court along with our partners the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries. These three associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the United States and Canada. These associations also cooperate in the Library Copyright Alliance to address other copyright issues that affect libraries and their patrons.

Google and the authors and publishers who sued the search giant over its book-scanning activities have proposed a settlement agreement that would end the suit and govern Google’s scanning going forward. In essence, the settlement would allow Google to continue scanning, and even to offer new products based on the body of digitized books it creates, so long as it shares revenue from these services with rights-holders. More information from the Library Copyright Alliance about the Settlement is available here.

While the parties to this dispute have agreed to the settlement, the judge presiding over the case still has to approve its terms. Copyright owners and other interested parties have filed hundreds of comments with the court. Members of the LCA filed Comments in support of the settlement, but we also raised some serious concerns that we felt the court should address by careful oversight. Students for Free Culture asked us to explain two concerns we raised in our Comments: increasing inequalities between universities and limits to intellectual freedom.

Widespread access to a Google institutional subscription plan with millions of digital books would help level the playing field between elite research universities and less privileged institutions around the country. If the price of the subscription is too high, however, it will have exactly the opposite effect: Students and faculty will demand access to the Google service, but only the wealthiest institutions will be able to afford it. Paying a high price for the Google subscription would divert significant funding away from other important university priorities, creating new inequalities even among universities that have the service. Some schools could be forced to sacrifice heavily to keep up with the wealthiest institutions.

What are the chances that the settlement will have this effect? It is hard to say. If its price is modeled on increasingly exorbitant academic journal subscription prices, the Google service will be out of reach for most institutions. The authors and publishers of most books in the Google corpus are most likely academics who prize access over profits, but if the interest of rights-holders is represented solely (or mostly) by commercial writers and publishers, the price could be set too high.

Intellectual freedom is at stake in the settlement in several ways. First, concerns about user privacy could have a chilling effect on research use of the Google product. Second, the settlement only requires Google to provide access to 85% of the in-copyright, out-of-print works it has scanned. This gives Google discretion to exclude over 1 million books. Google itself may not want to “be evil,” but it will surely encounter pressure from angry partisans seeking exclusion of disfavored books. The Book Search product will give everyone, including children, access to up to 20% of any book from anywhere, and 100% of any book from free public access terminals in public libraries. How long before an angry parent demands that Google ban racy or politically edgy works? The First Amendment does not require private companies like Google to forego censorship, and there will surely be pressure on Google to choose economic expedience over political principle.

Unlike other critics who have voiced similar concerns, we do not oppose the Settlement overall. We believe its likely benefits substantially outweigh its possible harms. The parties and the court can ensure this net gain by awareness of these possible harms and reasonable vigilance against them. Thank you again for this chance to share our views.

– Brandon C. Butler

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS

In this guest post, James Grimmelmann of New York Law School discusses the effects on orphan works. Interested readers should also check out the upcoming D is for Digitize Conference being hosted by NYLS.

The most important, and perhaps least appreciated, part of the Google Book Search settlement is its effects on “orphan works.”  There are hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of books that are in copyright but whose owners can’t be found. Anyone who wants to reprint them faces a catch-22.   Since the owner is unknown, there’s no way to get permission.  But if the new publisher just goes ahead without permission, it faces liability of up to $150,000.  No one wants to take that risk, so the orphan stays out of print.

The result is that orphan works languish in obscurity, hard to find and hard to consult.  If you’re not at a rich university with a huge library, you’ll have a tough time getting your hands on them. The orphan works problem is the Bermuda Triangle of the copyright system, where these forgotten books are lost to culture.

The Google Book Search settlement’s most exciting, and most dangerous, effect is on these orphan works.  Under the settlement, Google gets a license to sell copies of out-of-print books unless the copyright owners object.  For orphans, by definition, the owners are highly unlikely to show up and object.  The result is that most orphan works become will available again, both for individual purchase and as a bulk subscription to universities and libraries.

The downside, from a free culture point of view, is that only Google will be able to provide access to the orphans.  Instead of individual authors deciding on what terms to make their books available, that power is concentrated in Google’s hands.  If the database becomes a “must-have” item for research libraries, schools will compete against each other to have it, driving up the price until, once again, only the richest univerities have access.  (This might still be an improvement over the status quo, which privileges students who attend schools whose libraries have physical copies.)  Centralization also magnifies issues of scan quality, bad metadata, reader privacy (PDF), and censorship (PDF). These issues are all much bigger concerns if one company controls the only corpus of orphan works and can dictate the terms on which it’s provided.

Ultimately, the biggest reason to worry about the Google Book Search settlement  is its effects on the rule of law.  The class-action lawsuit by which Google is attempting to gain these rights is a complex, tempermental affair that pushes at the limits of the law and benefits one company exclusively.  A small group of large publishers and a self-appointed cabal of authors claim to speak for all authors worldwide.  And it will be enormously difficult for any other book-scanners to replicate the legal machinations that produced the settlement.  All of these precedents are bad for the integrity of the legal system and for the bottom-up processes of creativity, negotiation, and exchange that characterize a vibrant culture.

If the orphan works problem for books had been solved by Congress, at least there’d have been a place for everyone’s voices in the legislative process.  As it was, the settlement was negotiated in secret between a few parties, and its fate will be determined by judges weighing legal arguments rather making law for the public good.  The settlement is likely to be an enormous net positive for readers, but this is no way to run a culture.

– James Grimmelmann

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF

In this guest post, Rebecca Jeschke of Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the implications for student privacy.

A college student’s first job is to open his or her mind to new ideas and ways of thinking, challenging personal beliefs and assumptions.  The process of intellectual discovery demands exploration into the different, the challenging, the absurd, and even the uncomfortable.  For many scholars, artists, and scientists, a rigorous look at a broad swath of ideas and theories is the foundation for a life’s work in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

For anyone interested in this kind of intellectual journey, Google Book Search is an intoxicating idea.  The search giant’s plan to scan and digitize millions of books — and allow users to search for and read those books online — would open up the world’s libraries and bookstores to anyone with Internet access.  But without basic privacy protections, Google Book Search will never live up to its promise to change the way students and others read, research, and explore new ideas.  That’s because the “chilling effect” of Google’s tracking could stop these important journeys in their tracks.

Google will be able to monitor and track the books you browse, even knowing how long you spent on each page, and keep a permanent log of every book you’ve ever bought and what pages you’ve read.  When you purchase access to books, Google can use that information to grow its already long dossiers of Internet users — which is bad enough — but then all of that information is vulnerable to police, the government and other third parties who can seek it with a subpoena.

In the physical world, bookstores and libraries have fought for strong privacy protections, requiring the police to get a warrant before getting access to your reading records.  These strong positions were developed precisely to respect our private, personal relationship with reading and learning, and to block any “chilling effect” violating that privacy might have on Americans’ right to explore the world of ideas. That’s why Google Book Search needs a robust, enforceable privacy policy that gives readers as much privacy in online books as we already have today.

A legal settlement that would pave the way for Google Book Search to go forward without these privacy protections is pending approval from a New York federal district court.  But a group of more than two dozen authors and publishers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others, has filed an objection with the judge.  The coalition—including best-selling novelists Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem along with Anthony Romero of the ACLU and science fiction author Cory Doctorow—presents a list of privacy protections that would improve the settlement, including limiting tracking of users and  requiring a court order or judge-approved warrant before disclosure of the information collected, ensuring user control of personal information stored by Google, and making the system transparent to readers.

The future of books is electronic. Something like Google Book Search is what bookstores and libraries will likely look like going forward.  We can’t let reading privacy be the price we pay for opening the door to the world of knowledge.  You can learn more about the issues at stake here.  

– Rebecca Jeschke

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google

In this guest post, Derek Slater of Google explains why the settlement is a boon for students and the democratization of culture.

Google Books and our proposed settlement agreement help fulfill copyright’s core objective — opening up access to knowledge and creativity. If approved by the Southern District Court of New York, the settlement will give anyone, anywhere in the U.S., access to millions of books that today are only accessible at a few large universities. Google Books can already help students and scholars track down hard-to-find books, and under this agreement they will be able to read many of those works online as well.

In this way, “[the settlement] will help tear down the geographic and socio-economic barriers that deprive many Americans of equal educational opportunities,” as the United States Students Association stated in a letter to the court. Numerous voices from the civil rights, disability, library and education communities, representing tens of millions of Americans, also strongly support the agreement because it will help equalize access to information.

You can find more specifics about the agreement and its benefits here, but these groups and individuals — the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Federation for the Blind, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Professor Gregory Crane, and many more — explain the benefits to students better than I ever could.

I want to turn my attention to why Students for Free Culture in particular should care. SFC is among the leading voices for the born-digital generation when it comes to copyright. You have not simply pushed for legislation and hoped that Congress will eventually save the day. Instead, you’ve started campaigns to democratize culture at your own schools, and urged technology companies and content creators to build innovative, win-win solutions that meet users’ evolving values and expectations.

The settlement represents this sort of win-win, a practical way to address difficult problems. This case started when rightsholders sued Google for digitizing libraries’ collections. While Google fully believes that this is an example of fair use that would have been upheld in court (and the settlement does not compromise fair use in any way), we settled the lawsuits because it ensures greater access to out-of-print books and broad benefits for the reading public, libraries, rightsholders, and innovators. With strong privacy protections, users will be able to browse and buy digital copies of millions of books that otherwise might be left behind in the digital age.

For too long, copyright law and a thicket of legal uncertainties have locked up most out-of-print books. As copyright scholar Mark Lemley explains, the problem here is generally not that these books are “orphaned,” with rightsholders that cannot be found.  Instead, they have two findable parents – an author and a publisher – but sorting out who actually owns the rights may be hard. Because the transaction costs of licensing these books is high relative to their uncertain market value, these “neglected” works simply gather dust on libraries’ shelves.

The settlement not only enables Google to make out-of-print works accessible, but it will also make it much easier for anyone to license them. It establishes a non-profit Book Rights Registry that will actively look for rightsholders and can help resolve ownership disputes. As rightsholders come forward, the Registry will make information publicly available about which books have been claimed and by whom, and rightsholders can authorize the Registry to license third-parties, including Google’s competitors.  Over time, we believe a significant portion of books will be claimed.

Of course, a small fraction of books will remain truly orphaned. While these books will be among the least commercially valuable, there is still a strong public benefit in opening access to them, and the settlement is one step to that end.  In addition, as we said in our testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, we will let any other book retailer resell access to each out-of-print book, including orphans, that Google can provide access to under the settlement.

That said, this settlement is not a panacea for the challenge of orphan books or orphan works more generally. Google has long supported effective legislation that would make it easier for everyone to use orphan works, and this is still a top priority of ours.

Some have taken the well-intentioned position that legislative reform would be preferable to approval of the settlement. But, as David Sohn of the Center for Democracy of Technology discussed in a blogpost last week, this misconceives the settlement as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, legislation. And it would mean that these books remain locked up, as everyone waits for Congress to address not only orphans but also the far larger category of neglected books.

With the democratization of so much of our culture within reach, it would be tragic to turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

– Derek Slater

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction

The Google Book Search settlement runs hundreds of pages and can be confusing to the most expert of legal minds, but, in either its current or a modified form, it will have profound effects on how students around the world interact with knowledge. In the interest of better informing students about the settlement, Students for Free Culture has solicited the thoughts of a variety of experts who, over the coming days, will provide guest posts reflecting on how the settlement will likely impact students.

In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the official Google website explaining the settlement and the Public Index, an initiative of New York Law School that has an authoritative collection of information ranging from briefs to forums.

Stay tuned!

[Image Credit]

In order to connect organizations and individuals, we recently created a new wiki page that will host volunteer and job opportunities of interest to the free culture community.

We hope individuals will check it out and find some openings of interest and look forward to hearing from more organizations that would like to reach the Students for Free Culture community.

Stuart M. Shieber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University and one of the originators of the compact, discussed the idea behind it last month in an article in PLoS Biology, one of the current leading fee-based open-access journals that stands to benefit from the compact.  “Open-access journal publishing,” he writes, “is at a systemic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.”  While traditional journals receive tremendous subsidies from universities, both in the free services provided by faculty writing and peer reviewing the articles, and then the sometimes exorbitant subscription fees paid by university libraries, open-access journals were, to this point, not given the same advantages.

The Compact would reverse that disadvantage, giving a chance to the newer, freer business models of open-access journals.

We view this as a great step forward for open-access research, and very much in line with the principles we set forward for how an “open university” should behave.    As we establish the criteria for evaluating the openness of a university, this kind of measure is precisely the kind of effort on the part of schools that we hope to recognize.

The Compact is currently seeking additional signatories through their contact form.  Please contact them and try to get your school involved!  These five universities are high-profile enough that this move is definitely noticed throughout the world of academia; we should take advantage of this moment and momentum to get more universities involved and expand the pool of open-access content.

So, at 6:00 PM Pacific / 9:00 PM Eastern, we will all be meeting in the #freeculture room of freenode.

For those of you who need a refresher on what IRC is and how it works, there’s a quick howto after the jump:

First, you can either use a special IRC program or a web portal.

• For Windows, mIRC and XChat are popular options.
• for Mac OS there’s Colloquy
• for GNU/Linux XChat is nice.
• If you don’t want to download a program, the server we use, called freenode, has provided a slick web interface.

Next, select a nickname and connect your program at the server irc.freenode.net, and once you’ve connected, join the room #freeculture .  If you’re using the web portal, you won’t have to do anything to connect to the server, just the room.

If you still have questions, we have a wiki page which talks all about IRC, or feel free to e-mail me at parkerhiggins [at] gmail.com.  Look forward to seeing all you there!

Later this year Barcelona plays host to the world’s first Free Culture Forum. Over four days (October 29—November 1st), activists and researchers will convene to define an action agenda for Free Culture issues in the next decade.

This conference will follow the 2009 OXCARS, an alternative awards ceremony for Free Culture artists.

This is an opportunity to discuss, dance and work together. It’s also a chance to celebrate global perspectives about knowledge, culture and creativity that may differ than those promoted by media and entertainment conglomerates.

The Spanish state is quickly becoming a hotbed of activism, scholarship and research around Free Culture issues, making it a great place to launch a world Free Culture forum. But Spain’s national politics make the Forum an even more ripe opportunity for progress on Free Culture issues:

Why Barcelona? In January 2010, Spanish State will take up the European Presidency of the European Union. Spanish Government has already announced that one of their flagships will be reinforcing the control of the Internet and criminalizing the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world. Furthermore, within this context, Barcelona is closing agreements with cultural institutions to set new agreements to get a fairer sharing of copyrights. These agreements will be spread to other institutions in Catalonia and Spanish State.

In October 29th this year Barcelona will hold the Second Edition of the Oxcars Festival, an international event to honor the defense of culture and to show that other creation channels, as good and with as much quality as traditional ones, exist. The last edition was a success with more than 2000 participants
. Several worldwide voices have recognized the necessity to create international spaces for networking, coordination and building of a global frame for free culture and knowledge issues: the Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such a space.

The organizers have secured the participation of a number of great FC voices and they’re announcing more by the day. Plus, the OXCARS awards will be a guaranteed blast. Many universities provide funding for members of student groups to attend conferences. Check with your department, student union, special activities, or financial aid office to see if they can fund or subsidize your trip. The SFC board and the organizers of the FCForum will happily provide letters of recommendation and other resources.

Students for Free Culture is a partner in the World FCForum, but it’s not the follow-up to SFC’s Free Culture 2008 conference in Berkeley—it’s a brand-new international gathering. We’ll be announcing details about our next SFC conference, Free Culture 2010, in the coming weeks.

Conference schedule:

October 29th: Celebration of the Oxcars Free Culture Awards Festival.

October 30th: Panel presentations

October 31th: Working groups (Legal, Education, Economic, Free Software, Political)

November 1st: Plenary meeting to draft common agenda

More information

Website: http://fcforum.net/

Newsletter: 
http://openfsm.net/projects/freecultureforum/lists/freecultureforumbcn

Organization contact: info |at| fcforum.net

OXCARS 2008: The Movie

oXcars, The Movie from eXgae on Vimeo.

The five of us are thrilled to join (and rejoin) the 2009-2010 board of directors. We’re very excited about guiding Students for Free Culture over the next year—there’s plenty of awesome stuff in store.

You’ll hear more from us over the coming days about what we’ll be doing to re-energize SFC and the Free Culture movement. For now, we want to take the opportunity to (re)introduce ourselves:

Kevin Driscoll completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT last semester where he was a member of the MIT Free Culture chapter and part of the YouTomb research project. Kevin is concerned with encouraging everyday creativity and highlighting unexpected uses of consumer technologies by young people – especially in resistance to systemic oppression. In the fall, he will continue graduate work at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. You can see his digital traces on his superfeed.

Ben Moskowitz co-founded the SFC@Berkeley chapter of Students for Free Culture and created a seminar on the cultural dimensions of piracy. He also co-organized the Free Culture 2008 Conference and the Open Video Conference in NYC.  He is currently a student of Mandarin language at NYU SCPS and serves as General Coordinator of the Open Video Alliance, promoting openness in online video. See http://openvideoconference.org for more. Ben wants to see SFC become a force on campuses all over the world—let’s make it happen!

Kevin Donovan is a rising junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, majoring in Science, Technology & International Affairs with a certificate in International Development. He started the Georgetown chapter of SFC and has worked on technology policy issues at the World Bank’s infoDev program and is currently working on an OpenCourseWare pilot program. He writes about technology policy at Techdirt, his personal blog, and on Twitter.While in South Africa recently Kevin had the chance to go sandboarding, which is easily the coolest sport ever devised.

Christina Ducruet graduated from Brown University in May 2008 with a degree in Modern Culture and Media. While an undergrad, she founded the Brown chapter of Students for Free Culture in reaction to the RIAA lawsuits that hit 20+ campuses in Spring 2007. She’s been involved with SFC ever since, creating resources and organizing campaigns to rally people to the Free Culture movement. Christina is excited and honored to serve on the SFC Board for a second term and thinks the best is yet to come for SFC. She currently lives and works in Connecticut.

Parker Higgins is entering his senior year at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study.  He is the president of the NYU chapter of Students for Free Culture.  Stemming from his previous work with the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of the Miro HD video player, he runs the occasionally updated internet TV channels Free Culture TV and Yes We’re Open.  The channels feature freely-licensed FC-related content and highlight emerging issues for the community. This summer he is volunteering for Creative Commons.

So, what’s next?

You can review the notes of the first 09/10 board meeting here.

The nominations page contains each candidates’ thoughts on SFC and its future. Here is where the five of us agree that our time should be focused:

• Ensuring that the Open University Campaign is a success, potentially through a stand-alone site or committee-based action;
• Collaborating with other organizations and establishing SFC as a key public voice on free culture issues;
• Planning the next Free Culture conference; and
• Making involvement in SFC as user-friendly and accessible to new members and chapters.

Of course, SFC’s strength lies in the awesome people and projects of its local chapters. Chapter leaders can expect to hear from us shortly as we work to bring everyone up to speed with our plans to revitalize SFC. In the meantime, we want to hear from you—what do you think is necessary to keep SFC going strong through this year and beyond? What’s next for SFC? How can we improve? Sound off in the comments.

Now, the Office of Public Enagagement has published a PDF of the top suggestions (also available online). It provides a zeitgeist of sorts for the American public, and, excitingly, many of the topics are related to our work at Students for Free Culture. 

A couple commenters desired increased access to knowledge (A2K):

Libraries of all types need our support, 10810 points

“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of thegreatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from allour history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to thecollective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth ofour awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all betested by how well we support our libraries.” ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Carl said it best. Please continue and expand upon the support provided to libraries of all types.

– NJ Busch

Creative Commons is hiring a software engineer for our technology team, based in San Francisco. The ideal candidate would have experience in a few key areas (Python, Linux, web development) and the ability to learn quickly. Interest in the semantic web doesn’t hurt, either. We’ll begin reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews May 15, 2009.

See the job description for application details, and good luck!

The campaigning period for SFC Board Elections 2009 will close at Midnight PDT on April 5.

This is a reminder to candidates to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page.  Remember, your statement can include any information that highlights your candidacy and any other offering to the SFC constituency. Look at these prompts if you are just getting started.

Anyone in the SFC community can still add to the open list of questions, thoughts or concerns to candidates for SFC Board09.  This is a great opportunity to bring up specific issues that interest you – just make sure you take advantage while there is still time for the candidates to respond!

Voting begins on April 6, 2009 – more details to follow.

For additional information on the 2009 SFC Board Election: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board09/Election

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!

Nominations for the 2009 SFC Board Election have officially opened!  Please see the following details about who is eligible to be nominated, how to nominate, and what to do if you are a nominee:

Who is eligible?

In order to be a candidate for the SFC Board, nominees must either be a current member of a SFC chapter or currently serving on the Board, per our Bylaws.

How to nominate someone:

Let the person you are nominating know that you are doing so.  Then, visit the Nominations page to make your nomination official by filling out the nominee’s information using the template provided.

To accept a nomination:

Once your sponsor has added your information to the wiki, you can accept the nomination by updating your bio and statement.  In order for your nomination to be considered accepted, you must write at least “Nomination Accepted” before the close of nominations at Midnight PDT on March 20, 2009.

On campaigning etc.

Nominees will have until April 5th to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page.  The statement is an open forum for information relevant to your candidacy and an opportunity to address questions, thoughts or concerns from the SFC community to board nominees.

Nominations close at Midnight PDT on March 20, 2009.

For additional information on the 2009 SFC Board Election, including the updated schedule: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board09/Election

CC’s popular summer internship positions are now posted on the Opportunities page! We are looking for motivated students who can spend the summer at the San Francisco office to work with the staff on various projects. This year, we are offering technology, legal, international outreach, and graphic design/media development positions. Please spread the word to qualified students, or apply yourself! We are accepting applications now through March 13th.

The internship is a great way to see San Francisco, contribute your skills (be they in software, law, outreach, or graphic design) to the high-profile projects at Creative Commons. Also, a quick look through the staff page will show you that a good proportion of our current staff started as interns. We do offer interns compensation, which for me was enough to live in San Francisco for a summer and take home a little pocket money. I really appreciated applying my programming skills outside of school; suddenly, my projects don’t all disappear at the end of the semester but continue to support cause of Free Culture.

Get in touch with Jennifer if you have more questions, and be sure to apply by March 13! (You can talk to me, too, but I’ll mostly only know about the technology internship.)

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?

Initially, vidders developed codes for discussing their videos. panswendyy recounts one such strategy,

[My friend] uses the first letter of the character’s names, like B for Buffy, so if it were a Fuffy, she’d just put B/F.

Unfortunately, such codes are ineffective responses to the automated Video Identification system deployed by Google in 2007. With no voice with which to argue fair use, many users sacrifice the incomparably large community on YouTube for friendlier service elsewhere.

Before setting sail for imeem (or Vimeo, blip, dailymotion, etc), prolific YouTube users like cmspillane post videos explaining the reasons for their departure. (Ironically, because of its background music, we should expect the signoff itself to disappear.)

In response to an earlier blog post about preserving comments on disabled videos, Dean writes that YouTube might prefer that users are “unable to de-facto redirect to other versions of infringing material.” This should come as no surprise.

Mirroring videos is the most powerful immediate action that video makers can take to protect their rights as authors.

The gradual disappearance of videos from YouTube over the last 18 months progressed largely undetected because of an emergent practice distributed among thousands of community members. A few common searches reveals that the most popular videos are frequently ripped and re-upped under a variety of accounts. Like bees unwittingly pollinating a field of wild flowers, these re-ups are often executed by spammers looking for more hits on their other videos. The preservation of threatened videos is merely a by-product of their unscrupulous pursuit of views!

Moving to another service allows creators to continue practicing their craft but does little to challenge the irresponsible, wasteful industry practice of issuing copyright claims willy-nilly.

Can proactive re-upping and mirroring be an effective response to the accelerating disappearance of fanvids, remixes, home videos, and rare finds from the YouTube collection?

What would an automated mirroring / re-upping tool look like? Could YouTomb data be mobilized toward such an effort?

Remember, a DMCA takedown is not a judgement. YouTube disables access to videos based on mere claims of infringement. If you have had a video identified, the EFF wants to hear from you. Please do not let the short-sighted actions of a frightened industry intimidate you from participating in the creation of your culture!

(Cross-posted to the YouTomb blog.)

The Students for Free Culture board had an eventful weekend. Not only did we get a little storefront going for our fancy new shirts designed by Patrick Moberg, but we filed for incorporation, posted photos from the Free Culture Conference 2008, and sorted out some bigger plans tasks for the organization. You can read all about it in our public board notes and agenda. We’ll have some more announcements shortly (like our plans for Free Culture Conference 2009 and elections), so keep your eyes peeled.

Free Culture News is a project of Students for Free Culture and is a blog devoted to happenings in the world of free culture.

There are many sites dedicated to free software, a few to free content, a few to open educational resources, a few to patent law, etc, but there does not seem to be any one definitive resource to go to for general free culture news.  We aim to be that resource.

Keeping our posts minimal and frequent, and pointing to other sources, we try to bring the news as efficiently as possible.

FCNews calls itself “a project of Students for Free Culture” so it’s often confusing why we have two blogs.  One is for news, and the other for…more news?  Before I talk about the differences, let me give a brief history of FCNews.

FCNews sprung out of Free Culture at Virginia Tech, the SFC chapter at Virginia Tech (I’m the chapter head there).  It initially existed as the FC@VT meeting wiki.  My members would post links to news, and because they were not required to write their own analysis, or go through quality control loops they would post a lot of links. It was a wonderful resource because nothing like it really existed, only blogs pertaining to specific areas of free culture.  I read 50+ feeds devoted to free video games, legal battles with the RIAA, etc. and it was really nice to have our wiki as an alternative to that.  Not only could you get all news pertaining to free culture in one place, but you avoid getting tons of articles not related to free culture (eg: Boing Boing and Slashdot are great places to get news about free culture, but for every bit of relevant news, you get a lot of things not really related, and only reading some sections or following some tags usually makes you miss good stuff).

We decided that even though it would require a little more work, we wanted to share that resource with the rest of the world in a nice format.  Thus FCNews was born.

So what exactly are the differences?

Subject matter: SFC’s blog is generally written about SFC as an organization or about events that relate to free culture and education.  It’s not strictly tied down to these matters, but we try to keep it focused on students and on this organization.  FCNews covers free culture in general, meaning it won’t mention everything you find on this blog (because the focus may be too specific), but it will also mention lots of things you don’t find on this blog (because it doesn’t have much to do with SFC as an organization, or to education).

Originality: SFC’s blog consists primarily of original content and in-depth analysis.  FCNews relies heavily on block quotes as to keep the author’s work minimal.

Content length: SFC’s blog contains fairly lengthy articles.  FCNews keeps posts very short and provides the reader with links if they want to investigate further.  A reader of FCNews could read 10 posts in a fairly short amount of time.

Quality: SFC’s blog has a requirement of peer review.  This post will be sent into the hands of another to be proof-read, edited, polished, and handed to you in pristine condition.  It is held to a high editorial standard.  For the sake of speed, and to encourage contribution, every regular poster at FCNews posts without consulting anyone else.  You will find more spelling errors and grammar mistakes there than you will here.  At FCNews, we find the trade-off agreeable.

Frequency: SFC’s blog’s ideal frequency is one post every 1-3 days.  FCNews’ ideal frequency is 3-5 posts in one day.  Neither are really ideal at the moment, but you get the point.

Authorship: SFC’s blog is written by students, and though it wouldn’t mind having a guest blogger occassionally, plans on staying a student-written blog.  FCNews is also currently written by students, but we are open at any time for people outside of the organization becoming regular posters.

Hopefully that answers any questions that you may have had about the differences. The decision between keeping FC@VT news links on our wiki, making our own blog, and writing full articles for the SFC blog was something that was not decided lightly and involved a good deal of discussion.  There was some disagreement when the decision was made, but I think things turned out for the better this way.

So if you have some new and cool news pertaining to education and free culture, where should you post it?  If you just want to quote-and-link, head over to FCNews.  If you want to write a nice well-thought out analysis, post it here, and if it’s of interest to the general public, quote and link yourself on FCNews.  (Or maybe we will do that part without you!  We can be pretty quick sometimes.)

Obviously, this is an abhorrent trend that Students for Free Culture opposes. For more information, check out EFF’s white paper on the subject and EDUCAUSE’s information.

The Case at Hand

The lawsuit centers around Georgia State’s use of electronic reserves to make available digital copies of course readings. The case specifically approaches book chapters, though e-reserves are used at numerous universities for assigned readings of various types. By providing digital copies of course materials, students are able to access a wider range of information in the convenience that digital makes possible. While the publishers assert that Georgia State is part of a “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works,” the university claims that fair use clearly protects their policy.

As you may know, fair use permits the use of copyright “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” It rests upon a fuzzy four factor test which will be the center of this case’s copyright dispute:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

As is evident in the statute, Congress wanted to give wide breadth to education, but the panelists at Friday’s event warned that nonprofit education, such as Georgia State, should not been seen as a “trump card” because a judge may weigh the other factors heavier than the first. So, although the first factor (in addition to the above quoted preamble) clearly support Georgia State’s use of multiple copies for education, the other factors will be addressed, as well.

Factors 3 and 4 will be the focus of the complainants. Although Georgia State is only using portions of the copyrighted works, the suit alleges that “In many cases, the distributed excerpts constitute the very heart of the work at issue.” Although a professor may only have posted a single chapter from a lengthy book, Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises determined that if the used portion is “the heart of the work,” it can infringe, regardless of it’s length.

Finally, because course packs have been decreed a legitimate market, Georgia State is being accused of infringing that potential market of the publishers. However, for many courses, e-reserves are used because purchasing the numerous books used would be prohibitively high for many students. That is, the market doesn’t actually exist because students would be incapable of buying what is placed on e-reserve.

What’s At Stake; What To Do

Because Georgia State qualifies for soveriegn immunity, a lawsuit would only seek injunctive relief instead of damages. The implication is that e-reserves and fair use would be severely limited as a legal fact, even if Georgia State did not have to pay anything in response. In the words of Duke’s Kevin Smith,

“this is an attempt to enforce judicially a “pay-per-use” model of content distribution. The real irony is that it is justified as an attempt to remedy a “free-rider” problem — the claim that universities are appropriating the work of publishers and authors without just compensation. This claim is patently absurd, given the amount of money university libraries invest in published resources, but it is downright offensive when the real issue is clarified. Publishers here are themselves the free-riders, obtaining a huge amount of academic content from the universities and their faculty without compensation. The GSU complaint cites as an irony the fact that one of the professors who is cited as infringing the copyright of Sage Publishing has himself published three articles in Sage journals. The gall of the man! Nowhere is it mentioned that he was required to give up those articles without payment for the privilege of publishing with a company that is now suing his employer to recover even more money for those freely donated articles.”

The pay-per-use model is another example of the publishers seeking to grab more value from universities. Libraries spend millions of dollars purchasing and licensing material from academic publishers. In a physical world, the first-sale doctrine (through library lending and resale) mitigate “pay-per-use” but in a digital world of ubiquitous copying, the publishers want to squeeze more money out of schools.

So what can we do? Here are some ideas, but feel free to add yours in the comments:

1. Educate yourself and school. Raise awareness about fair use and its importance to scholarship and education on campus. Both faculty and students should learn about copyright and fair use. All universities have policies relating to faculty fair use and copyright; what’s yours? Georgia State says that no more than 20% should be used, but what is your school’s policy?
2. Encourage permissive options like public domain and Creative Commons. Faculty and administration need not worry about copyright lawsuits if they are using documents, images and video that is freely available without payment.
3. Support open educational resources. Encourage faculty to publish their work in open access journals. The fewer copyright bullies to sue universities, the fewer chilling effects on education. Open access is the (legal) offense against lawsuits like this one.
4. Get creative: Harvard’s Free Culture chapter created the Thesis Repository to both raise awareness about and quantity of open access scholarship.

As Students for Free Culture embarks upon an ambitious project to open up institutions of higher education, we should keep in mind that universities, and especially their libraries, tend to agree with the principles of access to information, scholarly sharing and creativity. However, they are often held back by actors such as Sage Press who seek to bottle up knowledge. As students we have an important role to play in educating about and assisting the creation of a free culture at universities.

“Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia’s George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU’s Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format.”

Perhaps I am biased because I currently attend George Mason Law and I’m trying to start a Students for Free Culture chapter here, but I think that it would be great if we took this opportunity to stand up for open source software against frivolous lawsuits. Even absurd lawsuits can occupy many years and tons of money and effort to dispose of completely (e.g. the SCO – Linux lawsuits), and Zotero / GMU can use all the support they can get. I found Tim Hwang’s pre-conference proposal for a free culture agenda to be very inspiring, especially his first suggestion to “Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works” and defend creative people who because of their reliance on e.g. fair use may be targets for lawsuits. To be sure, Tim’s proposal was to threaten activism as a deterrent to prevent people from being sued in the first place, but that obviously doesn’t preclude also organizing activism around people who have already been sued. His proposal was also more directed at artists and remixing, but given clause 3 of the Open University Campaign, “The university embraces free software and open standards”, supporting Zotero would be an extremely relevant piece of activism.

How can we support Zotero?

George Mason University itself has taken an excellent first step: in a recent e-mail to the student body, GMU has stated that “The University will not renew the institution-wide license for the citation management software EndNote when it expires on November 30, 2008″, due to the pending litigation. While students and faculty can still purchase their own personal copies of course, GMU recommends that everyone consider migrating to Zotero right away, and they have established a website to help people migrate their citations to Zotero.

It seems to me that if any universities are paying for site licenses for Endnote they should join George Mason University in refusing to renew their Endnote license and instead direct funds towards supporting Zotero development (or other developing open source citation management systems). Companies that sue their customers are usually on their way out anyway, it’s time to get off of the sinking ship and prepare for the future. The person who sent out the e-mail about the decision to the GMU community was John G. Zenelis, the “University Librarian/Associate Vice-President, Information Technology”… there may be someone with a similar position at your school who you could talk to. Why not try talking to your university librarian(s) today about transitioning your school from Endnote to Zotero?

Short of changing your university’s policy, of course, you can just stop using Endnote and start using Zotero yourself! Download Zotero today!

P.S. I don’t have much of a need for citation management software at the moment, but I do use one nifty feature of Zotero which lets you save a “snapshot” of a page exactly the way you are seeing it at the moment. I use it to take snapshots of things created by CGI scripts such as ticket confirmation windows which are impossible to save a link to, things I don’t expect to continue to be available such as articles that are going behind paywalls, and things which I expect to change such as wiki pages. The snapshots are saved as a folder with all of the HTML, images, javascript etc. which are necessary to render the page exactly the way it was, and the snapshots can be opened by any web browser. If this sounds nifty to you, give Zotero a try even if you don’t need citation management software. I know this isn’t Zotero’s primary purpose, but I enjoy it nevertheless The more people who use it the better, even if it’s not for the original intended purpose.

Planning to participate in an Open Access Day event on your campus? Want to help promote Open Access Day? Participate in the OA Day synchroblogging competition!

There are 4 key points that we would like you to address in your post (these are the same questions that we asked the stars of the Voices of Open Access Video Series that we will also release on that day):

* Why does Open Access matter to you?
* How did you first become aware of it?
* Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
* What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

To enter the competition, all you have to do is blog on this topic on October 14, 2008. We’ll use Google News/Technorati to track entries – to make this easier please use the phrase “Open Access Day” in your post.

The winner gets a bag of PLoS/scienceblogs.com goodies. Remember, in order to be eligible, you have to post about it today. So get cracking!

Live Blogging:
Tim Hwang blogging @ The US Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Brian Rowe blogging @ Freedom for IP
Luis G. Lira @ Scitechbizdev.blogspot.com in Spanish

Wraps ups are being published by:
Kevin Driscoll @ todo mundo
Kevin Donovan @ Blurring Borders

Micro Blogging:
Identica search for #fc2008
Brian Rowe, 3L Seattle University Law, Twitter: Sarterus Identi.ca: Sarterus
Tim Hwang, Harvard Berkman Center, Twitter: TimHwang
Mike Linksvayer, VP for Creative Commons, Identi.ca: mlinksva
shizhao Twitter: shizhao

I‘m twitter @shizhao
(I am sure there are other mircobloggers out there and I will update this list over time)

Post a comment or respond on the list to be added to the blog list.
The tag for the conference is fc2008 the hashtag is #fc2008

Additionally our IRC channel on freenode is #freeculture

Saturday October 11th
Feeling So Free @ Blake’s On Telegraph
8:00pm-2:00am
18+ (Bring the above flyer to get in after 10pm.)
21+ to drink
No cover

Three srsly sick DJs (and me!) on two floors:

DJ Ripley (Baltimore Club/ Dancehall/ Dubstep)
Kid Kameleon (Mashit/ XLR8R)
Refusenik (Thug Rave)
Lone Wolf (Hip Hop)

Video artist or VJ? We’d like to have your video running during the party. Get in touch with me via kevin//at//freeculture.org if you’re interested!

Several of our people need warm places to rest their free culture-loving heads this weekend. If you can help out, or know a good place to stay, please hit me up on email as soon as possible: kevin //at// freeculture.org

Your generosity is deeply appreciated!

The new game itself appears to be an argument about the perpetual nature of the struggle between cultural values of sharing and welcoming new ideas, and a “vectorialist” function that drains those ideas out of the commons. Defeating the vectorialist requires constant, active re-negotiating, and there does not appear to be a victory condition in sight

The release notes follow:

Hello,
we’ve just released a tiny abstract pretentious game called Free Culture
Game.

It can be considered an experiment of procedural rhetorics, a playable
theory or an advergame for a Spanish collective called exgae
(http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/whats-exgae).

The goal is to provide a simplified interactive rendition of theories
and propositions about knowledge capitalism (es. Negri, Lessing, Wark).
It’s a game you cannot lose. Even if you stop playing the game always
tend to a dynamic equilibrium between market and Common. The basic
assumption is that there will never be a complete privatization of
shared knowledge and without a strong opposition (represented by the
player’s action) the forces of the market will indefinitely exploit the
innovative ideas emerging from the society.

Link:
http://www.molleindustria.org/freeculturegame-eng
warning: it’s quite hard for non-gamers

Dragon*Con 2008 Parade, CC-BY-NC-SA, Tim Dorr

The people involved with Students for Free Culture represent a broad array of backgrounds and affiliations.* Use the conference as a opportunity to meet with SFC members of other chapters with related interests by suggesting an Affinity Group!

* Yes, even Halo cosplayers.

Want to participate? SPARC and PLoS are making it easy. If your university library is on the list of participating libraries (updated regularly), contact them and see what you can do to help. If your library isn’t there, encourage them to sign up, or host an event on your own. We are organizing a video webcast with a Nobel laureate and a PLoS journal editor-in-chief on October 14 at 7 PM EST and 7 PM PST. We’re also working on a “Voices of Open Access” video series for you to screen.

It’s true that Open Access Day is falling just a couple days after the end of the Students for Free Culture conference. However, I will be at the conference as a SPARC representative, and folks from PLoS may also be in attendance, so we can bring swag and start a dialogue about open access while we’re in Berkeley. And once you get home, all you need to do is buy snacks and tune into the webcast–it’s an event-in-a-box!

Besides the webcast and videos, there are plenty of other activities you could do with your chapter for Open Access day. Here are some ideas from last year. Get creative!

If your chapter is participating, register here on the Open Access Day blog to get information on how to tune into the webcast, hear other OA Day planning tips, and win some cool swag from PLoS!

The iPhone has led a new way, called contingent generativity, that makes generativity dependent upon an intermediary. Apple gets to decide whose Apps are available for download and though Steve Jobs had claimed that they would only block apps that were malicious, pornographic, bandwidth hogs, illegal or threats to privacy, that hasn’t proven true in practice. As I noted at Techdirt, Apple is becoming a price-setting intermediary that decided the “I Am Rich” application wasn’t allowable even though it didn’t seem to break any rules. “I Am Rich” isn’t alone; other apps which provide additional functionality have been pulled with little to no explanation.

But being an ex-ante regulator isn’t enough. Apple, which is famously closed in character, also has the ability to regulate apps already on a user’s iPhone or iPod Touch. The so-called kill switch was not disclosed to the public until a curious user uncovered the capability. Only then did Steve Jobs admit the functionality existed, saying Apple needed the capability but “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.”

This position raises a number of questions, many well articulated around the web, not the least of which is why Apple thinks it needs a kill switch an the iPhone and not it’s Mac computers. The issues raised and trend shown by the iPhone’s kill switch is worrying and, as you might expect, some clever engineers have found a way to disable it for jailbroken iPhones, but a thread on the Free Culture mailing list got me wondering if there was a better way to solve this conundrum.

I think there is and I think it should draw on the scholarship of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book I recently reviewed, Nudge. For the uninitiated, Nudge is a book about “libertarian paternalism” which aims to create situations where it is easier to make the best choice while not limiting other options. Through architecting designs that enable better decisions, or nudges, libertarian paternalism provides a middle ground between freedom and mandates.

Apple has the opportunity to do so with the iPhone kill switch. The intentions of the regulatory function are good: many users are, for whatever reason, unable to avoid or fix security compromises. Apple has experts who can help these users, but a mandatory kill switch is not the best option. It treats all users the same and removes their ability to run applications they desire, regardless of potential hazards. Asheesh Laroia suggested that Apple allow users to permanently opt-out of the system.

I would go one step further towards openness and make the kill switch an opt-in feature. Call it AppleCare Pro for iPhone or something less awkward. Heck, Apple could even charge for it! Make it a prominent decision in the set-up process and allow users to revisit the option when they desire. Provide nudges towards it when the user downloads an App which might be dangerous (similar to how Google warns searchers they may be entering a nasty page).

This would give the worried or non-experts the ability to have Apple’s paternalistic reach extend to their phones without compromising the autonomy of those who want independence. Parker Higgins of the NYU Chapter worries that those who need Apple’s protection are those likely to ignore the warnings, but I think Apple could architect a system where they are nudged towards better decision-making without a presumption of technological ignorance.

In doing this all, Apple should remain aware that openness and honesty is the best option. The fact that they hid the kill switch until outsiders found it is reminiscent of Comcast’s deceptive practices regarding BitTorrent throttling. Security is a worthy goal, but remember that those with the most at stake, the users, should be the most informed.

[(Mostly) Cross-posted at Blurring Borders]

The ever-awesome Kevin Donovan proposed that the Free Culture National Conference planned for October should have a session on development and Free Culture, and in the spirit of building action and bringing together collaborators in advance of October 12th — we’re making an open call to chapters worldwide who want to get involved in this new push.

If there’s organizations you think we should get in touch with that might be good collaborators with Free Culture or development/IP related projects that you’d want to kickoff at the October conference, drop Tim Hwang a line at tim AT roflcon DOT org.

Girl Talk is claiming his creations fall under fair use, which defines exceptions to the exclusivity of copyright. If he didn’t invoke fair use, creating his album would have been prohibitively expensive at the very least. More likely, the barriers to entry would have kept him from ever creating it in the first place. And let me tell you, that would be a damn shame. As I probably don’t have to remind everyone, there’s something wrong when this kind of creativity could be illegal.

Fair use needs to protect creative artists, and it needs to protect transformative works.  Law should take into account social norms and the public interest; if people find this type of art to be valuable, then that should factor into related legal deliberations. Likewise, Students for Free Culture should take a strong stand on fair use. We should discuss what areas of fair use are important to advocate for. We should think about raising hell if Girl Talk gets hit with a lawsuit.

UPDATE: Parker Higgins notes that Girl Talk was in the NY Times on Wednesday.

Sample Post:

No Punishment for Comcast.

August 1st, 2008

The FCC has voted to not punish Comast.  There will be (some) penalty (maybe) next time.

In a precedent-setting decision, the five-member Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to uphold a complaint accusing Comcast of violating the FCC’s open-Internet principles by improperly hindering peer-to-peer traffic.

“Subscribers should be able to go where they want, when they want, and generally use the Internet in any legal means,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement.

Comcast said in a statement that it was disappointed by the decision and was considering all its “legal options.”

The measure adopted by the FCC does not include any fines against Comcast. But it requires the company to cease impeding peer-to-peer applications, to tell the FCC how the practice has been used, and to notify customers about other network management practices it adopts in the future.

Did we really expect anything different?

Disclaimer: I sometimes post to FreeCultureNews.com . There was an open call on the SFFC list looking for writers a few months back. They may still be looking.

From the desk of Conley: Yes, we are still looking for more people to contribute.  Please email conley@freeculturenews.com if you are interested.

Map of Wesnoth

Wesnoth is a pretty neat turn-based strategy game with retro graphics.  It was my first time playing, and I really enjoyed it (except for the getting my butt kicked part).  One of these days I might actually be good at it and beat Karen and Nelson.

We’ll probably be doing another game night next week, so head over to Free Culture Gaming to keep an eye out for more free video game fun.

The Doha Development Round of trade negotiations originated to directly address issues of trade impeding the world’s poorest nations. These include intellectual property issues like access to patented medicine, as well as other issues, like agricultural subsidies. Just last week, talks at the Doha Round collapsed, leaving me to wonder how long it will be until the United States starts doing what’s right with regard to these critical issues.

I rediscovered Doha by hanging around on Wikipedia: a few weeks ago I noticed a bunch of work happening on the Doha Round article. I’m a sucker for participatory culture after all. But check out the article. See anything missing? I see a dearth of images that would be nice if we rectified (the one image on there today was added just yesterday). And look, the WTO is kind enough to make a photo gallery publicly available. It would be so great if we could include those pictures on Wikipedia.

So, Free Culturites, I have a call to action:

Email publications@wto.org and ask if they would be so kind as to release some or all of their photos under a free copyright license (something like CC-BY would be fantastic). After all, it’s not like the WTO exists to make money off of its photo gallery somehow. Myself and a fellow editor are waiting to hear back from them, and I figure some support couldn’t hurt.

Oh, and if you feel like it, jump in and help improve the article. Long live participatory culture!

HR 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act just passed Congress and is expected to be signed into law very soon.

Inside the bill is the Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention act, a provision which requires colleges to subscribe to RIAA-approved services like the new Napster and to install software on the network which monitors and interrupt transfers which they decide they don’t like. This is a mandate for a non-neutral internet on college campuses. Students are being targeted by a cooperation between the government and the intellectual property industry to spy on us, filter our internet and the resources of our schools by spending our tuition costs on their DRM’d service. And unfortunately, we let this slip under the radar.

For the full story about the passing is available on Ars Technica, who have done a better write up than I could do. I also wrote about this on my personal site just over one year ago. It seems the bill has been watered down slightly from the original amendment, but the effect is the same.

But where was the opposition from Free Culture? I’m not trying to blame anyone but myself, but I think that we must develop a way to constantly monitor and publicly oppose this type of legislation. Otherwise, what is the point of our organization if we continue to allow things like this to happen?! We’re going to be an absolute laughing stock if we have silly events which celebrate the death of DRM when we don’t make a sound about federal legislation which requires all of our schools to purchase products which use it. There was only one blog post about the bill, 8 months ago. Not a peep since then, no page on the front page about pending legislation. So I can’t say that we missed this entirely, but a single blog post doesn’t affect anything outside of our own community, which is where the problem lies. It isn’t working because it isn’t enough.

So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?

First, I think we should develop a page (perhaps on the wiki?) and a squad to monitor the progress of legislation which could be a threat to us.

Second, we should be supporting Lawrence Lessig’s Change-Congress Movement which will stop corporations from having so much influence over Congressmen. Particularly Democratic congressmen from California.

Third, I would personally recommend that any student should be using secure protocols for all of their data transfers to prevent their being snooped on and tampered with. One such upcoming protocol is Anomos, a secure and anonymous multi-peer-to-peer file distribution platform. I’m a lead developer on this project and I will write a post on this blog about it once our alpha release candidate is announced.

Does anybody else have any ideas about steps we can take from things like this going unnoticed again? Let’s gets some discussion going in the comments.

Rich, Boston University Free Culture

When I asked Conley Owens, Free Culture VT founder, why he thought FC Gaming is important, he responded:

Because it’s FOSS and it’s gaming… what could be cooler?

Because gaming drives computing. It’s the reason why graphics cards are so great and cheap, because of gamers. And if gaming can drive hardware, it can drive software. Right now I have tons of computer scientist friends who only use Windows because they can’t play their favorite games on GNU/Linux. If free games were more prevalent, perhaps they would switch. If you get the software development (and game development) community switching to a free platform, they will in turn help switch the world to freedom.

Play free games, free the world!

Hopefully that is enough motivation to join FC Gaming

Free Culture Gaming will be holding its first game night this Saturday August 2nd at 8pm EDT (tomorrow night), and we hope you will join us. For this game night, we will be playing The Battle for Wesnoth, an excellent turn-based strategy game. Sadly the Wesnoth web server is currently down, but I think we should give them support anyway during this trying time for them. You can still download the game from the Wesnoth SourceForge project for Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can still play multiplayer games if you go to Multiplayer->Connect to Server and choose the 2nd (or 3rd) option instead of the official server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please use version 1.4.4 of Battle for Wesnoth, or at least another version from the 1.4 series. Older or newer versions will not work well or at all.

Meet us in the Free Culture Gaming IRC channel at #fcgame on irc.freenode.net to coordinate with us (go here for details), or just join the 2nd alternative Wesnoth server and find us there. Hope to see you then!

UPDATE: The Battle for Wesnoth official website is now, um, sort of up again, so you may be able to download the game from there now as well. We might even be able to play on the normal official server! I guess we’ll find out tonight ^_^

The two new channels should be of interest to readers of this blog: one is called Free Culture TV, and it contains videos about free culture, or of particular relevance to members of the free culture community.  There is a list of the videos on the channel’s Miro Guide page, and I plan on adding many more in the coming weeks.

The second channel is called Yes, We’re Open! Free Movies, Music Videos and TV and is meant for all sorts of openly licensed entertainment.  As the name suggests, this includes everything from very short clips to feature length movies and documentaries, as long as it’s been released under an open license.  Again, the Miro Guide page has more information.

So here comes the pitch: I want all the help I can get with these.  If you know of something really great that’s not on here yet, chances are I’ve just missed it, and I’d love to include it.  You can e-mail me at parker [at] pculture [dot] org and I’ll get right back to you.  Currently, I don’t have plans to create original content for either channel, but if anybody expressed interest in making or helping to make something, I’d be happy to explore it!

Again, these channels are made for SFC and the free culture community, so if there’s something you’d like to see on it, please let me know!

Yes, We're Open! and Free Culture TV

Then perhaps it is time that you began boycotting Hasbro’s Scrabble, in all its forms. Why not:

• Refuse to use official Scrabble online games - Let’s face it, they’re not as good as Scrabulous was, anyway. You can join the Facebook group We refuse to use official Scrabble app since Hasbro shut down Scrabulous or probably a dozen others like it.
• Continue playing Scrabulous anyway – Hasbro does not own the copyrights to Scrabble outside the USA and Canada, some other company does. So, if you connect to Facebook from an IP address located outside the US and Canada, then you can continue playing Scrabulous just like the good old days. This Facebook group has easy instructions on how to do so, by connecting to Facebook through a proxy server. A silver lining to this lawsuit might be getting more people using the Firefox web browser and the FoxyProxy add-on.
• Avoid buying products from Hasbro – Do you really need a new Scrabble board? Aren’t there a gazillion Scrabble boards floating around people’s attics and garage sales that you could pick up for a song? Same thing goes for other Hasbro games! Exercise your first sale rights and buy used games instead.
• If you have a Scrabble board, don’t play Scrabble on it, play a different word game - What’s so good about the exact copyrighted version of Scrabble anyway? The Scrabulous developers realized this and released the more flexible Wordscraper, a Scrabble-esque game that lets you change the board/rules. If you have a physical Scrabble board, there are innumerable word games you could play with it. You could use the tiles to play Anagrams, a lovely fast-paced party game that predates Scrabble, or perhaps even Bananagrams. Or, create your own entirely new word game, and go down in history as the inventor of something even better than Scrabble!
• Make your own Scrabble-esque boards - Why buy it when you can make it yourself? The tiles might be a bit tricky (although a RepRap 3d printer would probably make short work of it once it’s generally available to the public) but it should be child’s play to draw a grid and fill in the boxes with double word scores or more interesting variations.

Honestly, Hasbro’s rent-seeking with the Scrabble copyright is a really annoying example of how copyright can hinder creativity rather than encouraging it. Scrabble was invented in 1938, and sold by the creator in 1948 to someone who could commercialize it (not Hasbro, Hasbro bought the copyright much later around 1986). How much real innovation has been done since then with Scrabble by people who benefit from the copyright royalties? Isn’t it telling that the innovators here innovated without benefiting from copyright controls or copyright royalties? This is a clear case of copyright outlasting its usefulness. Perhaps more importantly, I think it’s rotten that Hasbro is shutting down Scrabulous for bringing Scrabble to life again for a new generation… that’s not a proper reward. I’d love to send a message to Hasbro that their behavior is really uncool. Just because Hasbro has the legal power to shut down Scrabulous doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, either for their bottom line (see the Economist’s cautious endorsement of piracy) or for creativity in the field of gaming.

What do you folks think? Anything I missed? Anything you disagree with? If other SFC members and the Internet at large agree that these are good practices that SFC should follow, perhaps this could be adopted as an official SFC document?

Best Practices for Online Video

• Exercise your fair use rights - If you don’t use it, you lose it! When you need to quote something or reference something, do it, don’t be scared. Just follow the Center for Social Media’s “Code of Best Practices in Fair use for Online Video“.
• Open content licenses - Make it obviously legal to share, cut up and remix your content. Use a Creative Commons license that allows for remixing. (All current CC licenses allow for sharing, at least for noncommercial purposes.)
• Encourage remixing - Provide a copy of the video in an uncompressed, unedited form somewhere. This can make it easier for people to reuse your content in future projects.
• Provide a copy in an open video format - Use the Ogg Theora video format! It’s an open standard, meaning we know exactly how it works, and it is not patent-encumbered, meaning we don’t know of any patents that would prevent you from using it however you want, and nobody can force you or anyone else to pay royalties for the “privilege” of using the format. See Xiph.org’s page on Theora’s benefits and why Ogg Theora matters for internet TV. Blip.tv allows you to upload in Ogg Theora and it will attempt to play Theora videos in your browser using the Cortado java video applet (see the Inquirer article on this).
• Provide multiple formats - That said, you should try to provide as many video formats as practical. Give people options, in case they have trouble playing or using one or more of your formats. Just make sure one of those options is always an open format.
• Open source video editing – When possible, capture and edit your videos with open source tools, and promote those tools to others. Unfortunately, it is currently difficult to do FOSS video editing on Mac OS X. It is slightly easier to do it on Linux with tools such as Kdenlive, Kino, and Cinelerra, and Linux distributions dedicated to working with multimedia such as Ubuntu Studio. Also, the next version of VLC media player, 0.9, is expected to make it easy to do screencasting / screen capturing on any platform, with a nice GUI / wizard to walk you through the process.
• Open source media server - Use open source software to serve up your video. This is easy if you are video podcasting: any blogging software that produces a web feed with enclosures will do, such as WordPress. In fact, with WordPress, all you have to do is link to your video file in a format WordPress knows about (MP3 and MP4, from quick testing).  This automatically packages the video in an enclosure in your RSS feed so that anyone with a smart feed reader can automatically download the video. The Podpress plugin for WordPress should make this even easier. An open source media server for streaming video can be a bit more complex. The option I am helping SPARC pursue at the moment is ePresence, an apparently mature open source project which unfortunately requires a Windows computer at the moment, but which is supposed to be migrating to Linux in the distant future.
• Open source client - People should be able to view the video using 100% open source software, and you should encourage them to do so. Miro, a free / open source internet tv and video player, is great for podcasting. As for streaming media, just make sure it plays in VLC.
• Offer a downloadable format - Sometimes people want to access video while not connected to the Internet. Offering a download link lets people with slow connections watch your high resolution video through the power of delayed gratification. Also, letting people download your stuff aids distributed preservation.
• Decentralized distribution system - Services like Youtube offer convenience, but we at Students for Free Culture believe any one player monopolizing video distribution is bad. It’s good to preserve options of self-hosting and self-aggregating available, and to use them in parallel with other distribution methods.
• Redundancy and long-term preservation - Post your video to multiple locations so if one goes down it will still be available. Be especially sure to use the Internet Archive, as that is meant for long-term preservation. (Blip.tv will crossload video to the Internet Archive for you.)
• Provide good metadata - Tags and other descriptors can make it easier for people to find your video. Thumbnails can make it easier to skim through your content (automatically provided by Internet Archive). Categorize! Annotate!
• Write out a transcript - Gives you more googlejuice / makes your site more attractive to search engines! Also more accessible for the disabled.
• Provide feeds and other ways to subscribe to your content - If people like what you have, make it easy for them to get further updates.
• Bookmarking / social networking / embedding - make it easy for people to save the location of a video, and to share it with others. Naturally, try to support open source tools when possible, such as the Connotea scholarly bookmarking software.
• UPDATE: Film in the highest quality possible, and compress for the web later - Do not film in low-resolution with a mediocre camera simply because Youtube videos are typically low-resolution. First of all, High Definition video is slowly gaining in popularity on the web, as bandwidth and storage become cheaper and screens get bigger and higher-density pixelwise. Distribution platforms like Miro make it easy for even people with sluggish internet connections to enjoy HD video, since Miro and other podcasting software can download content when you are not around (e.g. when you are sleeping) and serve it to you later. Although you will want a low-res version for people with slower internet connections, you should also publish an HD version for those early adopters on the cutting edge. Second of all, you can reduce the quality of your video by compressing it or reducing the resolution (e.g. by digitally zooming in on a person’s face) whenever you like, but it is impossible to increase your video to a higher resolution if you did not record a high-resolution version. Capture the best video you can, and compress it later to make the file size small enough to fit through the Intertubes.

UPDATE: For more suggestions and information on creating online video, check out Make Internet TV.

Check out the agenda for the meeting on our wiki, if you want to know what we will be talking about, or even add items to the agenda yourself

If you don’t know what IRC is, check out our IRC wiki page, or just click on the Mibbit widget below to go directly to our IRC chat room!

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!

I’d just like to take this opportunity to say what a great project Firefox is for free culture. It is an excellent web browser, and its popularity across every platform provides a nice example of open source software for us to refer to when explaining the concept. It’s also notable that one of the greatest things about Firefox is its add-ons / extensions, which are unmatched by any other browser as far as I’m concerned, and the fact that Firefox makes it really easy to play around with its guts is another great talking point when explaining the open source ethos. (I frequently compare proprietary software to a car with its hood welded shut, while open source projects are more like ordinary cars.)

Firefox has not been perfect. For starters, it has not been completely open source software, since its crash reporter in Firefox 2 was the proprietary program Talkback. This will be fixed in Firefox 3, which replaces Talkback with the open source project Breakpad, and that alone should serve as a good incentive for free culture advocates to download it ASAP.

Also, the silly trademark controversy when Mozilla refused to let community-produced versions of Firefox bear the Firefox name or logo did a lot to generate (minor levels of) ill will within the open source community. Personally I think that Mozilla’s treatment of the trademark issues is heavy-handed and excessive. Compare Mozilla’s approach with Lawrence Lessig’s approach towards the “free culture” brand. In 2004 I registered the domains freeculture.org and freeculture.net in anticipation of founding this organization, based on Lessig’s use of the term “free culture” in his OSCON 2002 presentation. I was completely unaware that Lessig was about to publish a book under the name “free culture”. When heard about the release of the book, I immediately e-mailed Lessig to apologize for grabbing all of the good domains (freeculture.com had already been snapped up by a cybersquatter). His response was something like, “No problem! Let’s take this opportunity to show everyone how unnecessary heavy-handed protection of trademark is. I’ll link to your website from my book’s website and you can link to my website from yours, and that should clear up any confusion that people may have if they accidentally visit the wrong website.” And that’s exactly what we did! You can still see the link to Lessig’s site in the upper right hand corner of our website, and we are still linked to from his book’s front page. When a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Debian promotes Firefox they are doing Mozilla a service, and Mozilla should just work with them to try to keep the quality of the community Firefox builds up to spec rather than preventing them from giving Mozilla free positive publicity. If Lessig had demanded that we shut down our website or stop using the free culture name, Students for Free Culture may not exist at all today, or at least not in a recognizable form. Perhaps co-founder Luke Smith and I would have been discouraged by this unfriendly treatment and turned to some other form of activism where we felt more welcome, or perhaps we would not have attracted as much support without flying the free culture banner. Who knows? All I know is that this relationship between us and Lessig has been beneficial for both of us, and I’m glad that Lessig promoted and supported it rather than threatening us with trademark law.

That said, these are minor quibbles among friends, and I do not think that these complaints about Firefox are a reason to refuse to see Firefox for the great boon to free culture that it is. I will be downloading Firefox 3 today, and I hope that you will join me in setting a world record!

I couldn’t believe it!  We must owe them so much money!  In a hurry, I wrote a little command to see how many times we infringed.

tput sc && wget --wait=1 -qr -O blah.txt http://freeculture.org & tail -f blah.txt |
sed -r ":a /([^<][^\/][^a][^>]|^.{,4})$/N; s/\n//g; ta" | egrep -o "" |
awk '/|<\/img>)/{ct++}{printf("%d", ct)}{system("tput rc")}' && rm blah.txt

It counted 918 times before I killed it! The horror!

The Singaporean firm VueStar’s website claims it “offers to URL owners the opportunity to secure a ‘Licence of Use’ for locating web sites that are using visual images’ pursuant to Patents granted and in existence in several parts of the World.” We’ve heard outlandish claims like this before, and indeed any four-year-old can put up a website asking the world for money, but news articles indicate they are already asking for royalties on these patents from websites, including non-profit websites like Mr. Alvin Koh’s arofanatics.com according to that link.

Using images in web links is pretty much as old as using images on the web at all. Patents are only issuable in the case that there is no “prior art” indicating the invention is already known. In this case, one must imagine both someone so cynical to think the Singaporean patent office would let this patent through as well as a patent examiner who simply has no idea that this is a universal way to use images on the web. As a result, this company could claim we infringed at least 918 times.

In truth, the patent would disappear in court – the prior art is clear as day. But how much money would be spent on lawyers by people defending themselves from VueStar first?

(Please note that using this command may put undue stress on the web server and admin(s).)

“We call upon public libraries around the world to remove the unethical Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies currently locking down many of their digital collections. DRM compromises public trust for the sake of providing limited access to popular works to some in the short-term. As concerned patrons, we request that libraries immediately establish policies against the use of DRM technologies.

DRM requires users to cede control of their computers to third-party corporations, so they can restrict when and how they may access “checked out” books or audio files. This is an inappropriate and unethical requirement for a public library to impose on its patrons. The notion of checking something out is based on physical scarcity — to be manufacturing scarcity where none exists is entirely contrary to a library’s mission.

Libraries that use DRM are submitting patrons to the onerous and unethical legal terms involved with purchasing, installing, and using software such as Microsoft Windows and the Windows Media Player. In the case of Microsoft Windows, this entails agreeing to terms that allow Microsoft to delete software and data that the user legally owns and has created or installed on their own machines. For a library to require their patrons to agree to such End User License Agreements as a prerequisite for gaining access to its collection is an injustice.

These software requirements drive the sales of DRM technology vendors, such as Microsoft and OverDrive, providing an incentive for patrons to discontinue using software and materials that do not impose DRM. The common argument that DRM and proprietary software are necessary because publishers require them becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the library is using its own market power to encourage their use, hurting the emergence of competing alternatives in the process.

Random House, the largest publisher of eBooks and audio books worldwide, recently announced its decision to drop DRM from the vast majority of its catalog. Random House made this decision after doing a study which found zero cases of DRM-free works being shared illegally. They found that it was ONLY the DRMed titles that were being shared.

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt used by the software industry to convince publishers and distributors to use DRM has blindsided the public and institutions of public trust. Little consideration has been given to the ethical and long-term implications of accepting and encouraging the use of DRM. Defending the public interest means thwarting DRM.

For these reasons, we ask that libraries immediately embargo the use of DRM on their collections and establish formal policies against it. There are undoubtedly many challenges facing libraries today that need to be considered, but few can be as timely or as important as the way the library defines itself and its role in our digital age.”

Personally, I’m not sure about how libraries, especially academic ones, are going to react to this proposed ‘embargo.’ Kicking DRM to the curb is an idea that I agree with wholeheartedly, but many of the licensed resources such as Scholarly Journals, have a pretty vivid history of inflexibility in regards to DRM as a means of protecting their products.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on in the very near future, as well as a topic that Students for Free Culture might take a public stance on. I’ll post whatever I find that’s of interest!

PS: Check the pic of Gavin I nicked from Wikipedia’s DRM page…

~Excelsior!

Read a summary here

See the full text here (PDF)

The EFF has this to say about the legislation (House Passes Controversial PRO IP Act):

“The most outrageous provisions would create new and unnecessary federal bureaucracies devoted to intellectual property enforcement. None seems more ridiculous than language creating a Cabinet-level “IP enforcement czar” that would report to the President and coordinate enforcement efforts across government, a proposal that has been loudly opposed by the Department of Justice.”

In a time when many public University systems are facing huge budget deficits (for example, the University of California faces a $400 million deficit), is creating a new layer of federal IP enforcement a useful allocation of funds?  Especially when the proposed legislation has been criticized by the very people it directs.  Rather than using funds to relieve financial stress in education, or any other strained public service, the 110th Congress has chosen to help organizations like the RIAA and MPAA fortify their own warped IP ideologies.

Stay tuned for more updates and analyses.

Demographics

Virginia Tech is one of our several technology-centric chapters, founded by people who are interested in open source software and who run Linux. Due to poor representation of women among the computer-science-y demographic, Virginia Tech also suffers from a lack of ladies, although there were two female members present while I was there. As our chapters have matured and broadened their scope to cover more issues, they have drawn in many other sorts of people from different walks of life. Many of our newer chapters were founded by people (many of them women) who are more interested in art and remix culture for example, or in open access publishing and access to knowledge. Apparently VT had a member who joined because of his interest in music, and who was involved with the radio station and was putting together an FC radio program of some sort, but who dropped out of the chapter due to personal reasons. Free Software is the primordial soup from which the broader Free Culture movement emerged, however, and Linux users and open source advocates will always be one of our core constituencies. That’s perfectly fine, as long as they’re not the only people involved!

I encouraged the FC @ VT folks to try to do events and activities that target different demographics than their own, and it seems likely they’ll do more to expand their appeal next school year.

Frets on Fire

On the other hand, open source software is pretty darn awesome! Above is a picture of me playing Frets on Fire towards the end of the FC @ VT meeting. Frets on Fire is an open source clone of Guitar Hero, which can use either actual Guitar Hero guitar peripherals, or any keyboard you might have lying around. It’s more entertaining to watch someone play guitar on a computer keyboard Given that the music industry has decided that Rock Band is a new way to release music and make money from licensing, it’s great that open source efforts like Frets on Fire give anyone the power to release their music as a track that people can play, or for fans to transcribe the music of their favorite band…. it’s problematic if the only way to release such interactive music is with the permission of Harmonix or RedOctane.

Frets on Fire is impressively pretty and plays well, and it’s a good sign I think that an open source project which requires the skills of programmers, musicians, graphic designers etc. can be so successful. Let’s face it, in the digital age many creative endeavors now require software and programmers, and open source software will only become more important. It’s great to tie it into music and art with projects like Frets on Fire.

Choice of meeting space, equipment

Although my talk took place in a larger lecture hall, FC @ VT apparently normally has its meetings in this smaller classroom in the computer science department. I know that chapters don’t necessarily get to choose where they meet, as sometimes they have to simply make do with whatever space is available, but a chapter’s meeting space definitely affects the feel of a meeting, so it’s definitely worth considering what you want your chapter’s meetings to be like. The circular arrangement of the seating in this room lent the meeting something of an egalitarian, communal aura, which I liked.

It’s also important to make sure that the room has all of the equipment and furniture that you want. In this case the room had a screen and a projector, although unfortunately the projector decided not to cooperate that day, so they had to substitute a large computer monitor from next door. Testing equipment ahead of time is essential! The chapter members informed me that they have been doing a number of showings of public domain movies on campus, but they used to have serious trouble with the showings because they would download the movies from Archive.org and the downloads would sometimes be corrupted or incomplete, and they would not discover this until the showing itself. Now one of them tests all of the media that they want to use well before the day of the public event. If this had been a public event, hopefully they would have tested the projector before the event as well

Group discussion, per the wiki agenda

As the circular seating arrangement might have suggested, one of the main items on the agenda was a group discussion, about news in the free culture realm. Talking about the free culture issues in the news is really important, both to keep your members up to date and informed, and to debate and wrestle with various ideological and ethical problems that may arise… it’s good for everyone to know the issues inside and out. Unfortunately, sometimes chapters can get so wrapped up in the business of organizing activities that they never get a chance to think and discuss, and at that point it’s sometimes good to get less ambitious and slow things down a bit. How will you ever get new recruits up to speed, or keep them interested, if you’re just working all the time?

What made the discussion especially interesting to me is that all of the topics had been written down in the agenda for the meeting, on the chapter’s wiki. Here’s the agenda for the meeting I attended after my talk. Students for Free Culture provides free mailing lists, blogs, and wikis to our chapters, and each chapter uses its webspace differently. Some chapters do not use a wiki at all, and the ones who do use it have very different styles. The way we used the wiki at Free Culture Swarthmore, and what I recommend to each chapter when we give them a wiki, is to create a wiki page for each meeting, collaboratively write the agenda for the meeting on that page beforehand, and then take minutes on the same page during the meeting.

I must say, however, that I don’t recall ever putting FC news / group discussion topics on the agenda for meetings at my chapter. Normally there’s a lot more work/business on the agenda, and the VT members noted that their agendas usually have more business on them as well, but since it’s the end of the semester there wasn’t much left to do. Even more interestingly, they actually commented on the agenda items a bit on the wiki before they even arrived at the meeting, treating it like a forum. This made everything very well organized, and everyone had the facts right at their fingertips in the forms of the relevant news articles etc. while they were talking. The funny thing was that with such a detailed agenda that many of the members had obviously looked over and commented upon before the meeting, there wasn’t really much of a need for minutes, and they dispensed with minutes almost entirely at this meeting, only taking a few notes at the end of the agenda during the “open floor” section. This may be a model worth replicating at a chapter near you!

Showing a documentary in pieces

FC @ VT had another innovation that I had not seen before, in the way that they showed documentaries during their meetings. They decided that they wanted to watch Good Copy Bad Copy during their meetings, but that they didn’t want to devote an entire meeting to just sitting and watching a movie. Also, their attention spans were likely to give out before the end of an hour-long documentary So instead of watching the movie all at once, they split it into 15 minute sections and watched it serialized, one section at each meeting. We were watching the third out of four sections the day I was there, and indeed most everyone seemed to be paying attention pretty much the whole time, occasionally making remarks about what was on the screen. Once the section was over, they had a brief discussion afterwards as well. As long as you don’t forget what happened the last week, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to show a documentary for a club which meets weekly.

Also, I highly recommend Good Copy Bad Copy, it’s quite entertaining! My main complaint is that since much of the movie takes place in other countries, much of the dialogue is in subtitles, and the subtitles are a little hard to read. I recommend showing this movie on a large screen under ideal movie-showing conditions, otherwise you’ll be straining your eyes to read the darn subtitles. (Hint: a far-away computer monitor is not ideal.)

EFF decoder rings

Some people do not understand the EFF decoder rings or why we included them in the care packages. To be honest, the EFF just sent us a truckload of the things, and we ended up using them as packing peanuts to get rid of them. It’s fascinating how the decoder rings have been a smash hit on some campuses, such as UW Madison and Virginia Tech, and left others completely befuddled.

In case you are among the confused, let me explain the point of the decoder rings clearly: There is a spinny thing on each decoder ring, and on one side of the spinny thing you can see a number, and on other side a letter. In order to encode some text, you spin the ring until you see the letter you want to encode, and then you write down the number that you see on the opposite side of the ring. To decode text, you simply reverse the process, searching for the number that is encoded, and then writing down the letter that it is paired with. The reason that the decoder rings say “Circumvention Device” on them is because they are a subtle dig at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which included “anti-circumvention provisions” that made it illegal to circumvent encryption on copy-protected content, e.g. to decode the scrambled data on a DVD without permission, and it also made it illegal to distribute “circumvention devices” which make it possible for people to e.g. back up their DVD collection (resulting in tools like DVD X-Copy being driven off the market). Theoretically the DMCA could even make these decoder rings illegal, although it is unlikely that a copy protection scheme would ever use a simple rotation algorithm to encode the content. The DMCA anti-circumvention provisions embody serious threats to freedom of expression, scientific research and security research, academic freedom, and other important rights.

Now that I’ve explained the joke to you, it’s probably no longer funny, but crucially it seems that many people at chapters like Virginia Tech are either (1) geeky and well-informed enough to know what the DMCA is and get the joke, or (2) really excited about the idea of decoder rings, regardless of their purpose or why they are there. It’s nice to see people who have enough of their inner child left to appreciate nifty but practically useless little widgets like these decoder rings, and I’ve seen a number of chapter members passing ring-encoded messages to one another, both in person and online. While we are saving the world, let us not forget how to have a good time. 18-12 _ 25-7-11 _ 20-3-17 _ 1-8-3-4 _ 14-5-18-15 _ 25-7-11 _ 1-7-20-6!

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 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!

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.

As the bylaws state, Students for Free Culture is supposed to have a Core Team. The Core Team is the people who make all the decisions in the org that are too low-level for the Board and require more frequent meetings–i.e. whether or not we should sign on to a petition, what our next national campaign should be, what projects we should direct our volunteer efforts toward, etc.

Becoming a voting member of Core Team is pretty easy. You must 1.) be a member of a SFC chapter and 2.) attend two consecutive meetings. (See the bylaws for more info)

Obviously, we haven’t had any meetings yet, so there won’t be any binding votes taken at the first meeting. However, we’ll be talking about our goals for the semester and getting pending issues out on the table so we can vote on them at the second meeting. We’ll also be starting to think about who should be the chair and vice-chair of the Core Team so we can get that out of the way soon.

It should be noted that Core Team meetings are *NOT* for making assignments/volunteering, except perhaps for the simplest, easiest tasks (e.g. “Christina, could you email Helpful Partner Org to inform them that we have decided to sign on to their campaign?”). This is partly to keep the meetings focused and partly a reflection of the fact that Students for Free Culture benefits from the volunteer work of many people who are not members of chapters and thus ineligible to vote. However, I expect that many Core Team members will be participants and leaders in Volunteer Team meetings as well. Thus, Volunteer Team meetings will take place after each Core Team meeting, plus additional meetings when appropriate. (More on that later, perhaps after this first Core Team meeting.)

See you all on Monday in IRC!

All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities.

The sharp commenter continues:

The point is that copyright law is way behind what is the norm in actual day-to-day life, and part of it is that “fair use” is not part of the law, it’s part of case law, which is far behind practice.

Pogue at the New York Times illustrates what we have long hoped: Many students already believe in some of the things Students for Free Culture does. We want a culture “where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way.” I personally think that the best way to pull people into the future of a culture based on sharing is not to simply take without asking, as in the “download a DVD without permission” example, but to both (1) make people understand the value of sharing their work, and (2) supporting those that do, like the growing numbers of people sharing their creative work under permissive licenses; many of our chapters agree.

We have dozens of active chapters today. Somehow the work we have done has often seemed distant or academic, perhaps deservedly so. But sometimes we’ve made our points in brutally obvious ways, from classic projects like Barbie in a Blender or Cereal Solidarity to newer projects like the Day of Action for Open Access to scholarly literature. Unified by a vision of sharing and openness, our students fight for their own rights to share their own work, argue that their universities and colleges could share more with the world, and explain why more access to knowledge and culture would be good public policy.

On more personal notes:

To all who have participated in chapters of Students for Free Culture, or worked with us on events, or helped organize other chapters (like me, our humble web team leader): Thanks. It’s refreshing to see our active members range from the pre-historic Nelson, whose first Free Culture chapter was founded before the name “Free Culture” described us, all the way to people like Tim who started his chapter this calendar year. I’m personally proud that we’re continuing the tradition of drawing from a broad group of students: filmmakers, technologists, law students, and artists, just to name a few labels.

To Downhill Battle: I miss your inspiring work and your amazing name.

To Jesus: Happy Birthday today (observed).

This bill contains wording that, if passed into law, would jeopardize federal aid for universities if they refused to filter their student’s internet access. In other words, the bill is designed to force universities to police their student’s internet connections in a way that no other ISPs in the world do. Besides encouraging a violation of network neutrality on campuses, this bill demands universities to do something that is technically impossible — how is NYU’s router supposed to be able to tell the difference between a Creative Commons licensed video podcast that you’re downloading via Miro and an “illegal” file your roommate is getting off of a file sharing network?  The point is they can’t — no technology has been invented that can properly discover whether a file is “legal” or not (consider how difficult it is for a judge to decide whether a use is fair, and then think of trying to create a chip that would do it) and no technology will ever be invented to do this.

The dubiously titled “College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007” (coming in at a staggering 747 pages, the relevant part is from pg. 411-413) is a bad deal and we need to let our representatives know it before they vote on it on Wednesday at 9am.

Take the five minutes to call your representative and let them know how dangerous this is to free speech and higher education. Committee members include:

Democrats

• George Miller, Chairman (CA-07)
• Dale E. Kildee (MI-05)
• Donald M. Payne (NJ-10)
• Robert E. Andrews (NJ-01)
• Robert C. Scott (VA-03)
• Lynn C. Woolsey (CA-06)
• Rubén Hinojosa (TX-15)
• Carolyn McCarthy (NY-04)
• John F. Tierney (MA-06)
• Dennis J. Kucinich (OH-10)
• David Wu (OR-01)
• Rush D. Holt (NJ-12)
• Susan A. Davis (CA-53)
• Danny K. Davis (IL-07)
• Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)
• Timothy H. Bishop (NY-01)
• Linda T. Sánchez (CA-39)
• John Sarbanes (MD-03)
• Joe Sestak (PA-07)
• Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
• Mazie Hirono (HI-02)
• Jason Altmire (PA-04)
• John Yarmuth (KY-03)
• Phil Hare (IL-17)
• Yvette Clarke (NY-11)
• Joe Courtney (CT-02)
• Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01)

Republicans

• Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, Ranking Member (CA-25)
• Thomas E. Petri (WI-06)
• Peter Hoekstra (MI-02)
• Michael N. Castle (DE-At Large)
• Mark E. Souder (IN-03)
• Vernon J. Ehlers (MI-03)
• Judy Biggert (IL-13)
• Todd Russell Platts (PA-19)
• Ric Keller (FL-8)
• Joe Wilson (SC-02)
• John Kline (MN-02)
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05)
• Kenny Marchant (TX-24)
• Tom Price (GA-06)
• Luis G. Fortuño (PR)
• Charles W. Boustany, Jr. (LA-07)
• Virginia Foxx (NC-05)
• John R. “Randy” Kuhl, Jr. (NY-29)
• Rob Bishop (UT-01)
• David Davis (TN-01)
• Timothy Walberg (MI-07)
• Dean Heller (NV-02)

Consider saying something like the following:

Hi, the Committee on Education and Labor of which ______ is a member is considering a bill entitled “The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007″ which would strip universities of federal aid money if they do not filter the internet their students use. This is dangerous for free speech, education and the affordability of college. Please have ______ work to amend this.

Two recent developments show that the internet’s effects on the music industry is being mirrored in the textbook business. At the beginning of this school year, the Harvard Coop bookstore was reportedly kicking out students who were writing down book prices for online comparison shopping. The management claimed copyright over the prices, but public outcry, led by Harvard’s own, seems to have mitigated the issue. After all, one can’t copyright facts.

More recently, the Follett Higher Education Group has sued Ugenie. Follett, purveyor of textbooks to many college students (including me), claims that Ugenie has violated both the Terms of Service and the DMCA by “scrapping” prices from the efollett.com site and providing comparison price shopping services. Wired’s Threat Level blog details the charges here. And a useful analysis of the intellectual property claim is here.

While the merits of the case are up for debate, I think it is clear that the consumer (students) are set to lose if Follett prevails. Both the Coop and Follett are attempting to use government created monopoly to limit competition and as anyone who has taken Econ 101 can tell you, a lack of competition means higher prices – in this case, for the textbooks which are already so expensive.

As I have said before, a binary solution to a non-binary problem is dangerous. The issue of copyright is not black or white – principles like fair use make copyright a subjective matter of which a computer is not the best judge.

According to Gigi Sohn at Public Knowledge, a few seconds of matching will not be sufficient to block the submitted video, but because fair use can be much longer than a few seconds (think about the documentary Outfoxed), this places a previously absent burden upon YouTube users.

Before these binary solutions, copyright owners needed to challenge reuses they thought were not fair use. Now, citizens need to justify their fair use.

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.

Last week, FreeCulture.org signed a response statement along with Consumer Federation of America, EDUCAUSE, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Free Press, Knowledge Ecology International, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

NBC Universal (“NBC”) has asked the Commission to require that broadband providers “use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband networks to transfer pirated content.” While we agree that there are appropriate ways to discourage copyright infringement on the Internet, NBC’s call to require that broadband providers use “bandwidth management tools” to effect this end is misguided. Any attempt to use this technology to control what may be done on the Internet will have serious unintended consequences. Particularly, these technologies limit First Amendment freedoms, stifle innovation, threaten personal privacy, and do little to address the underlying problem. Additionally, NBC’s proposal invites the FCC to exceed its jurisdiction.

You can read the full comments on Public Knowledge’s site or as a PDF.

Also check out NBC‘s original comments (PDF link) for a good laugh, and Public Knowledge’s coverage and commentary.

Tonight, Sunday July 22nd, at 8pm EDT (calculate your time zone), we will be holding an online meeting to discuss the various ways that people can volunteer with FreeCulture.org and advance the cause of free culture among students everywhere. It will take place in our IRC channel at #freeculture in irc.freenode.net (more info on IRC), an internet chat room that anyone can join. You can see the agenda for the meeting on our wiki ahead of time, and after the meeting is over minutes should eventually appear there as well.

Whether you can make this meeting or not, if you are interested in volunteering please join the Volunteers mailing list, and we will send you information about future meetings and other relevant information.

There are plenty of opportunities for people who are not members of a chapter, so anybody who is interested in helping us out should feel free to attend this meeting and join the Volunteers mailing list.

Probably the most major change with the new site is that we’ve moved the entire site into open-source WordPress, which previously only ran our blog. This will make editing the site’s content and appearance in the future more accessible for non-geeks and much easier for everyone.

The new site, grey boxes notwithstanding, is a lot more dynamic and includes plenty of pictures and graphics, something the old site didn’t have very much of. It also makes it easier for visitors to learn about FreeCulture.org by putting information about the organization and the free culture movement generally right on the front page.

The site will see a few tweaks in the coming weeks, likely including a new mailing list signup, web IRC client, an ‘issues’ page, minor CSS hackery, and some new content and links. But overall, the web team is pretty proud of the new face of FC.o. Thanks to Matthew V., Asheesh, Karen, Nelson, Pascal, Nicholas L., Parker, Alex, and everybody else who helped code, draw, and debug the new design!

If you see a problem with the new site, please visit our bug tracker on Launchpad and file a bug report. (Please file separate bug reports for separate bugs, it makes it easier to keep track.) This is seriously easy, don’t worry if you don’t have any web design skills, just explain the problem explicitly and in as much detail as you can, including which browser/OS you are using.

We can also use help maintaining and improving our website, so if you’re interested in helping out just e-mail web@freeculture.org or swing our IRC channel, #freeculture on irc.freenode.net.

Click the photo for more shots from my trip.

To strengthen the national organization, and give our chapters the help they need to have an amazing semester this coming fall, we have a crafty plan which we have already begun to put into effect:

Provide FreeCulture.org chapters with free web hosting

As a reminder of how useful the national organization can be, we are now offering free web hosting to all of our registered chapters. We already offer mailing lists and wikis, and we plan to offer blogs and other software in the future. Our most successful chapters have been using such tools since their inception. Wikis can be used for writing agendas for meetings and taking minutes at them, collaboratively editing documents such as the chapter’s constitution, or perhaps planning events and assigning tasks to various members. Blogs can raise the profile of a chapter, bringing its activities to national attention, and also make the club more attractive to prospective members at their school by making their activities more transparent. Mailing lists are essential for announcing meetings and events to members.

These web applications can be enormously helpful when organizing a chapter and trying to communicate with other chapter members, but it can be very difficult sometimes for chapters to get their own:

• School webhosting can be full of restrictions that make it difficult to run software, and getting school hosting in the first place can require wading through bureaucracy. We have very little bureaucracy at FreeCulture.org, and since we have our own (virtual) server, we can give chapters the freedom to run whatever software they want.
• Hosted services like Blogger frequently use proprietary software. We use only free software on our server, so you can rest assured that our hosting is ideologically pure. More importantly, even hosted services that use free software (like WordPress.com) seriously limit your ability to customize your site, while we can let chapters go crazy editing their sites and we can install any plugins / themes that they want. We also won’t force annoying advertisements on our chapters or their readers.
• Some chapters in the past have used one of their members’ personal off-campus hosting. This can end badly when the hosting member graduates and the current members lose access to the site, or nobody left in the club is still computer-savvy enough to update the site’s software. I’m confident in saying that our hosting won’t disappear, since it is hosted on Joi Ito’s rack in Japan, and our sysadmin Asheesh Laroia has been hired by Creative Commons upon graduation, so he will be able to continue to support us for the indefinite future. Even if Joi and Asheesh were to vanish and our free hosting dried up, we would have sufficient funds to pay for hosting for our server for years, even if we never get any more income, and we could continue to provide the same services to our chapters. Also, since we have the entire organization to draw sysadmins and programmers from, we will always have some people competent enough to run our website and server (or at least more than any individual chapter could ever field). When you host with us, you don’t have to worry about updating your software, because we can update the software for all of our chapters’ websites automatically in one go.

While chapters are as always free to run stuff on their own, we believe that providing hosting for our chapters will allow them to focus on the important business of activism on their campuses, instead of struggling to produce and maintain their websites.

Bring new chapters into the fold, and reopen communications with old chapters

We have developed an inexcusable e-mail debt over the past few months, for which I personally apologize. A number of people have e-mailed us about wanting to start new chapters, and over the past couple of weeks I have cleaned out most of this e-mail backlog, responding to them and helping them get their chapters rolling. (Of course, people keep e-mailing us, so this job is never done!) Webhosting is only one of many services we plan to provide for our chapters! We’ll be shipping care packages full of pamphlets, buttons and other goodies as usual over the summer to our registered chapters, and we intend to provide plans and “starter kits” for events and activities which other chapters have carried out successfully in the past.

We will also work on bringing together our chapters, both old and new, to share their ideas and experiences in a number of ways. We will be starting to have online meetings again as the semester winds down, and as Elizabeth noted, we are having a national conference at Harvard University on May 26 which we hope representatives from many of our chapters will be able to attend. I would also like to have some smaller get-togethers over the summer in various cities, perhaps like the photo scavenger hunt and BBQ that our USC chapter sponsored recently.

It’s worth reminding people of some ways that we already connect our chapters together:

• The Discuss list – We have a mailing list where FC members and other interested parties debate free culture and related issues of the day. Very high traffic! But also lots of fun. You can sign up for it here, and/or you can read posts to the mailing list in a blog-like format on Gmane.
• Our IRC channel – We hold most of our online meetings in our IRC channel, an internet chat room based on open protocols. It’s located at #freeculture on irc.freenode.net, where many open source software projects also have their IRC channels. It can be easily accessed using a web browser through our web IRC portal, if you don’t have an IRC client. Some of our geekier members hang out there frequently, even when we don’t have meetings, so feel free to stop by and say hello!
• Copynight and CC Salons – We encourage our members to participate in these monthly get-togethers, especially over breaks when they’re not on their home campuses. It’s a great way to meet students from other chapters, as well as other free culture activists from various walks of life.

We hope to encourage volunteerism, get more people involved in the national org, provide more social opportunities inter-chapter, and better recognize the work our volunteers do.

Improve diplomatic relations with other orgs, build partnerships

Collaboration is an important part of free culture, and it only makes sense for the various organizations in the free culture movement to work together. FreeCulture.org has been a bit of a loner at times in the past, and I think we need to open up more lines of communication. To jumpstart this process, a few FreeCulture.org student activists will be meeting in Washington, DC with a number of free culture-friendly groups about a week from now in the offices of Public Knowledge, to see how we all can advance free culture among students and the wider population.

Revamp the national website

FreeCulture.org’s front page has been kind of ugly and text-heavy for a while, so we’ve got some volunteer designers working on making it prettier, and we’re almost done! Our new theme needs a little tweaking to work in Internet Explorer, but it should be done within the next few weeks. We will do our best to make it standards compliant, with validating HTML/CSS. We’ll also update our text/content, a process which is long overdue.

Solidify our organizational structure

FreeCulture.org began as a loose confederation of local clubs, and while there was some benefit to not having any more bureaucracy than necessary, the time has come (or came a long time ago) for us a more formal structure for making decisions on the national level and implementing them. About a year ago we created a board of directors (which I “sit” on), but we simply accepted all who applied for that responsibility without holding elections or having any democratic, representative process. We also did not formalize any bylaws which would explain how the board of directors (or the rest of the organization) would function. We intend to rectify both of these problems in the coming months.

We have a draft of bylaws for FreeCulture.org which we will post for people to comment on in the next week or two (perhaps using the same software as the GPL v3 comments process), and we plan to have the chapters officially approve those bylaws in the next couple months. Once the bylaws are approved, we can hold official elections for a new board of directors.

Seek funding and non-profit status

This is something we’ve attempted multiple times in the past, but I’m confident that with a stronger national organization we will finally be able to succeed. In order to better serve our chapters, we will actively seek grants and funding. (This could also enable us to hire an employee as suggested below.) It would also make it easier to get funding if we were a tax-exempt non-profit, or sponsored by an organization that is a tax-exempt non-profit. If we were 501(c)3 ourselves, our chapters could use our non-profit status to help with their own fundraising. (We could even theoretically provide microgrants to our chapters.) We will look into both options once again in the coming months.

Hire an “executive director”

After a few years of experience, we have come to the conclusion that there are a number of boring duties around FreeCulture.org that nobody wants to volunteer to do (e.g. reading and responding to e-mail, writing grants). Volunteers can do these jobs (somewhat unwillingly), but they are always unavailable at inconvenient times… students will have exams to study for or papers to write at precisely the time that that some emergency strikes the organization. (We are not immune to Murphy’s Law.) It seems that it would be best to hire someone who can (a) work reliably (at least a regular part-time employee, if not full-time), (b) do the boring jobs that volunteers don’t find fun, (c) help organize our volunteers and make sure important jobs get done on time. An employee could also hold down an office, receive physical mail and run our shipping operations, and “man the phones” to ensure that there is always someone to call in the case of a free culture emergency.

FreeCulture.org will of course continue to be chapter- and student-based, but by “professionalizing” our central operations, we can have a lot more impact than all of our chapters working in isolation or left to self-organize. The person hired would most likely be a recent graduate or someone taking time off from school, which (1) keeps down costs, (2) offers experience for the individual, and (3) keeps the org close to students. We are making changes, but we’re not abandoning our fundamental grassroots nature… we’re just trying to become better at the fundamentals.

Sadly, our funds are currently extremely limited, and we can’t actually afford to hire an employee at the moment. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, because nobody wants to write the grants that would allow us to hire someone to do boring things like writing grants or applying for 501(c)3 status. We may have a fundraiser at some point to support initial funding for someone who can write grants etc., so stay tuned.

(I say “executive director” because there is some debate about what the proper title would be. I don’t really care what the job is called, so long as someone gets it done.)

Back to you

What do you think of our crafty plan? Leave a comment or e-mail us.

If a chapter does not already have a wiki, we will create a new one for them, and it will spawn with default content to help them organize their activities and run an effective chapter. We have studied the wikis of successful Free Culture chapters, and used that real-world experience to create a default wiki structure that is proven to work well, so that a new chapter doesn’t have to learn through trial and error. If a chapter has an existing wiki, we can import it into our hosting setup for them, and our wiki hosting offers a number of additional benefits: we will always keep the wiki software up-to-date, we will install effective anti-spam measures, and soon we hope to offer federated logins so that you only have to sign up once to have an account on all of our wikis.

We intend to offer blogs to our chapters as well in the immediate future, in the same fashion that we offer wikis today. That would complete the basic package. Eventually we hope to add other useful tools to our chapter web hosting, such as calendar-sharing perhaps.

Our entire software stack is Free Software, of course.

freecult@www:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on www! rms would be proud.
freecult@www:~$

Our mailing lists are managed by Mailman, our wikis run on Mediawiki, and our blogs will run on WordPress (or to be more accurate a multi-user version of WordPress called Lyceum).

(And remember, if your chapter does have an army of local geeks, we can give you a more powerful sandbox to play in.)

As a consumer, you can now pay $0.99 for a DRM’d song or $0.30 more ($1.29) for a DRMless version with higher audio quality (bitrate). You can also up-convert your music for $0.30.

During these approx. four years of iPod + iTunes Music Store dominance, I always thought that Apple had built its empire on the lock-in between the music store and the portable player. So this move surprised me (I checked the date – April 2, not April Fool’s). This is a very different approach to the music industry than we saw with Microsoft and the Zune, and I’d say this looks very hopeful. The Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, seemed to be a a pushover for the DRM folks; Microsoft gives about a dollar per Zune sold to Universal, a major label. That’s money handed to Universal for doing absolutely nothing. And the Zune has the famous “squirting” feature which provides very restricted music sharing, adding restrictions to any song you share.

This isn’t the first time EMI has played with selling music online without digital restrictions. Late 2006, they distributed a Nora Jones song in the standard MP3 format on both the Yahoo! music store and eMusic (a company I personally buy music from).

The way I see it, Steve Jobs is performing a market experiment. What do consumers think their freedom is worth?

EFF info with link to full text.

UPDATE: One of our UPenn alumns, Bill Herman, writes in support of the FAIR USE Act of 2007, despite some reservations because it is a bit less awesome than the DMCA reform bill Boucher sponsored in 2005.

UPDATE 2: Check out the OpenCongress page for H.R. 1201.

The Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of AAP held a pre-conference meeting that Monday to talk about the way technology, specifically “Web 2.0″, was affecting the way students consume and use academic content. They asked Sayeed Choudhury from the JHU libraries to find a few students who might be able to give them a student’s perspective; he brought me, a history post-doctoral student, and another computer science grad student. The event’s name was “From the trenches”.

We each had a few minutes to talk before we would each be inundated with questions. It was a very active, interested group attending our panel, and I really appreciated that. I made a couple of points, but I want to first highlight one thing that we at FreeCulture.org have been thinking a lot about lately.

That is, of course, Open Access. I believe that the public has a right to read the research it pays for with tax dollars. I further believe that as we start to taste what open access is like, pressure will come from the demand side. At lunch, I talked with an editor of a smallish journal on clinical oncology, and he said that neither he nor the people whose work he was publishing cared much about the access model, so they just did it the way the usually do it: charge for copies.

That’s why I think the demand-side change is so important. When academics realize that they’re cutting readers away from their work, they will demand to be published in an open access model.

I heard a presentation this summer from Science Commons about the work they were doing in analyzing and revisualizing a corpus of neuroscience papers, I was deeply impressed; I saw natural language processing technology being used to make the progress science more comprehensible. But most libraries aren’t allowed to let their students do such analysis because of the contracts they sign with publishers. Open Access has the power to do away with these restrictions; as always, it’s not just about getting it free of cost, it’s about freedom.

I started by telling them outright that students find publishers typically getting in the way of access rather than enabling it. I told them it was their job to fight this by providing value.One thing they wanted to know more about was, What sorts of tools do students use (or want to use) to manage reference information? I highlighted PennTags, an extension to the U Penn library catalog that lets students tag books and articles with tags in the style of del.icio.us. This sort of system – where students can tag anything with the same interface – is what we’re after. In the presentation after ours, an editor from Nature discussed their new collaborative filtering system for Nature articles, and that’s the kind of walled-garden approach that is so boring in the Web 2.0 era.

I told them about the Long Tail. Some of them worried that Web 2.0 becomes a popularity contest, but I pointed out that it’s not the same popularity contest for everyone. The niche markets can add up to more volume than the mainstream, as the famous Amazon example reminds us. Tim Stinson, the history post-doc, made a great point of this too.

To me, this is reminiscent of the same fight: How do we get the public to realize what freedom tastes like so it knows to demand more? Free Software and open source have been wondering this for decades, and are just figuring it out, but there are many more people who can read than can code. Being allowed to read and discuss current science is easy to explain and understand.

I closed by talking about authority. The Educational Testing Service had an “Information and Communication Technology” test last year that showing that not even half of college students can correctly determine the objectivity, timeliness, and authority of a document. I took issue with the claim that this was a technology-related skill set; when people hand me pamphlets on street corners, I need the same skills. Anyway, it’s my feeling that college students are only going to get better at this given the huge amounts of data we can access on the Web.

There was one question I want to highlight: Someone asked if we each purchase content online right now. Because the JHU library makes available every academic work I need access to (that isn’t already Open Access), I don’t buy academic work. But I also don’t buy textbooks online. I made it clear that students view DRM’d textbooks as broken, and that we would be willing to part with cash for non-broken digital delivery. Provide value, I told them.

Here’s the full text of what I remember saying. You can also read my notes from after the event for the few questions I remember answering.

First of all, let me thank you all for being here and inviting students to speak. Thanks to Sayeed for the great introduction.

I want to begin by honestly sharing with you the feeling that most of us college students have: publishers get in the way of access to knowledge. What I want you all to consider is how to change this perception.

Here’s an analogy from another field of publishing: Online music stores floundered for years until Apple created iTunes. For years and years you’ve read about college students sharing copyrighted songs. What did Apple do differently? They created an integrated experience, building the ability to pay for music into their music organizing program, and – crucially – they made every song cost the same amount of money.

Consumers with half a second and a buck could now, on impulse, buy the song they wanted and take it with them, even if just on Apple-branded players. Apple provided enough freedom for most users, and they allowed consumers to forget about the publishing companies and their various deals with Apple.

I want to turn to a case study in crossing Web 2.0 with academic publishing: PennTags, a project at the University of Pennsylvania. It integrates with the U Penn library catalog, and wherever you see a resource, you can tag it with words and phrases. The engineers worked out how to make every resource taggable, be it a New York Times page or a PDF journal article provided by Elsevier. The result is at tags.library.upenn.edu: students doing research can forget about publishers and just get to work with the library search engine; as they find things that look interesting, they match them up with projects and labels. When it comes time to write the paper, they get a personalized view of the library’s content. Even better, students can see each others’ tags of documents and get immediate insight about the material they’re browsing.

My mother uses EndNote, but most of my fellow students have never heard of it. They would love to use a web app like PennTags.

When end-users can forget about publishers, they feel empowered and happier. What you need to do is be of value to consumers like the record labels making money through iTunes.

[pause]

These words and phrases that users use to tag books and articles on PennTags represent a common theme in the Web 2.0 mindset: make services flexible for users. You’ve already heard a bit about Folksonomies today. In 1994, Yahoo! was born to put every important page on the Web into strict categories. People moved on to search engines like what Google introduced in 1998: Google’s big idea was using web links as votes. If lots of people linked to some web page, it must be important! They used the massive size of the web to rank the pages in it, hoping that some sort of consensus would form that, for example, “white house” would go to the government web site instead of some unrelated commercial site. Today, tagging lets readers a part of the consensus that emerges around a web page.

[pause]

I want to move on to a topic that I’ve been a bit involved in lately. A group of Students for Free Culture has been active in this space.

Open Access is a movement that has been gaining buzz lately. At its core, it represents the ideal that much of the world’s scientific work should be available free of charge for all to read. In a medium like the Web where copies cost nothing, electronic journal subscriptions cost libraries ten times as much as print subscriptions. Students like me familiar with the web find this amazing. Organizations like the Public Library of Science fund successful journals like PLoS Biology by getting money on publication; then they distribute copies for free. When so much research is funded by the government, students resent having access to that knowledge restricted behind pay walls.

But it’s more than just about getting papers free of charge. It’s also about freedom. A smart engineer, the likes of whom built PennTags, may come up with a way to visualize papers. Maybe he can discover and show citations, refutations, and supporting articles. But the library signed a contract with you folks banning him from running that analysis on the journals the library pays for. Open Access is about freedom, not just price.

Web 2.0 has built this terminology, the “long tail.” It’s used to describe the new opportunities the free linking on the web creates: there a vast
array of niche interests on the planet, and by letting everyone communicate freely with everyone else, they will find each other. Amazon, for example,will sell more books today that didn’t sell yesterday at *all* than books that did. That means the niche markets together are a bigger market than the bestsellers.

I want to close with a look at authority. I talked about consensus earlier, and Wikipedia is another success story of consensus on the web. Lately there has been some fuss about professors banning students from citing it, but serious students have never been allowed to cite encyclopedias anyway.

Many of you may be familiar with the Educational Testing Service’s study on so-called “technical competence” that was published toward the end of last year. The preliminary results indicated that only 49% of college students could identify correctly a website’s authority, objectivity, and timeliness. I object to the use here of the phrase technical competence: this has nothing to do with technology. These are reading skills problems. They are exacerbated by the breadth of information available online, but if someone on a street corner hands me a pamphlet, I need just the same abilities.

It used to be that the academic library was the largest repository of knowledge students would run into. Today, that’s the web. We’re getting comfortable with tools to manage constant information overload, so we’re going to expect academic versions of the same tools to help us do our research. In fact, we may even want to bring our existing tools in. That’s why I like PennTags so much; students who use social bookmarking sites like Delicious can apply the skills they already have.

We do need to evaluluate authority on the Web. If I read something I have trouble believing, I ask a service like Technorati or Google blog search what the rest of the web is writing about it, right now. Savvy students already know, and higher education is working on teaching these skills to everyone. So we’re going to get better at it. The line between academic and personal use is definitely blurring because, for the first time, we have access to vast amounts of information (whatever you want to say about its quality) outside the library. We’re talking to each other about it, linking to articles in our blogs, and discussing it in the comments.

I started by saying that we feel publishing companies restrict knowledge. The contrasting look we have is at libraries, who handle making information available. If you want, you can see that like the iTunes music store: we can forget about the publisher and get right to the information.

On the other hand, I have seen electronic textbooks that students are not allowed to copy and paste from. The more you lock it down, the less value you provide, and the more students will look elsewhere.

We are not radicals. Sorry Washington Post, you’ve just got us pegged wrong.

Our philosophy is founded in decades of legal scholarship. That’s why people like Larry Lessig support us. We may dramatize the issues to help them connect with students, but we are far from radical.

On the contrary, this demonstrates the breadth of the consensus in favor of public access. From the staid librarians to kooky little us. It is the publishing companies, who want something for nothing, that are the special interest, as Peter Suber points out:

Do supporters of national OA mandates like FRPAA want something for nothing? No. We want something for something. Crawford is forgetting that taxpayers have already paid for the underlying research and that publishers pay nothing to receive the written results. Yes, publishers add value to those results. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then what’s the best way to split this baby? The FRPAA solution is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. If the AAP wants to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, then it’s saying that it wants no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. I’d call that getting something for nothing.

All Scooby Doo references aside: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

UPDATE: Note that this is exactly in line with the strategy the publishers bought from the “pit bull,” i.e. “if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements.” It is my intent to remain on the offensive and to discredit their statements.

Community + Media Development Internship

This internship is for an eager student who is interested in building Creative Commons and Free Culture communities. The internship will focus on a grass roots effort, and/or media development to encourage the reuse of content. While FreeCulture.org club participation is encouraged for this position, a practical enthusiasm is a requirement. This position will be offered to a non-law student. Particular skills in media creation (video, audio, software) are desired, as well as demonstrated community involvement in and around Creative Commons and FreeCulture.org

Help us help Creative Commons help you!

UPDATE: Heh, some people apparently thought that leaving comments on this post was the correct way to apply for the Creative Commons internship. That is incorrect, unfortunately. The correct way is mentioned on the opportunities at Creative Commons page:

How to apply

If you are a college or graduate student interested in our internship program, send us your:

* Cover Letter explaining your relevant interest in Creative Commons and in the position.
* Resumé
* Two References; please include email and phone number.

Applications and questions can be sent to:

Jennifer Yip
Office Manager
fax: 415.946.3001

Thank you for your interest in our organization. Please no phone calls.

Not such a bad trade. And once tracks are down, they’re sent to affiliate stations in the region for airplay. The kids at AA even claim “[i]f it’s really, really good we sit around making nice CD cases with construction paper and glue.”

The project’s roots are deep in free culture, and it only makes sense for chapters outside Boston/Cambridge to participate. If you’re interested in helping to expand the scope of AA, check us out and let us know!

-The Boston Phoenix on AA
- AA on MySpace
- A Free Sound: my (closed-source, I know) blog on the label’s progress, and relevant issues of free culture and music

UPDATE: Antenna Alliance was recently covered on public radio, on the show Here and Now on WBUR:
Music Sharing Program For Musicians.

Free Culture Labs will be a network for open source hackers interested in assisting development of open source, Free Culture-related software. Free Culture Labs will work to recruit interested programmers, primarily (but not exclusively) from college campuses. We will provide resources for entering members and suggest projects for experienced developers. These projects will include both those directly maintained by FreeCulture.org and some from external organizations that relate to our mission.

We are interested in suggestions as to what specific software we should use for the project, including bug trackers, repositories, blogs, wikis, forums, and version control. We are currently considering WordPress and bbPress for the blog/forums and expect to host projects externally. The current wiki page is at http://wiki.freeculture.org/Free_Culture_Labs.

Three months ago, our old web hosting provider (Leafyhost) suffered a disk failure and didn’t have backups of our data, so we lost our subscribers list. So we want to take this chance to re-invite you all to discuss Free Culture!

Visit our list information page to sign up (or unsubscribe, if you choose). You can read the archives on the web, too.

Freeculture.org will be holding an organization-wide Open Access event in NYC on Sat., Jan. 13, 2007 from 12-5pm at NYU’s Courant Institute in Room 101. We have some great guests lined up from PLoS, SPARC, and Science Commons.

All chapters are invited and encouraged to attend.

The event will be free and is open to anyone interested in advocating for Open Access and Free Culture on university campuses. There will be food and refreshments and we’re hoping to record the entire session to post online.

As opposed to last year’s Freeculture.org NYC regional summit, this event will be more specific and focused. We’ll be tackling the issue of how to advocate for Open Access on university campuses. We want to take action and start targeting faculty and professors whose work is publicly (or university funded) but is published in closed journals that charge exorbitant prices to libraries and students. There is an alternative out there and we want to make sure everyone knows about it. Access to Knowledge isn’t just important, it is your right as a student and member of a larger academic community.

The event will be interactive, with presentations from influential professionals working in the Open Access world followed by smaller working groups.

Interested in coming? Just RSVP to oa [at] freeculturenyu.org right now — we’ll have an official list and page set up soon, but we just wanted to get the word so that you could be sure to save the date.

Please join us on Friday, December 15, 2006, from 6:30pm until 9:30pm, to celebrate Creative Commons’ birthday!

Raise a glass and toast the four years that CC has worked to promote and enable a participatory culture. CC’s big day is being hosted by our good friends at Eyebeam.org.

Eyebeam is located at 540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues) in Manhattan, New York.

There will be a bar provided by Eyebeam.

Since we’re in the midst of our annual fundraising campaign, we’ll be asking for a small donation at the door. Please contribute whatever you can to show that you support CC’s work.

The details: What: Creative Commons Turns Four! When: Friday, December 15, 2006, 6:30pm until 9:30pm Where: Eyebeam – 540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues) in Manhattan, New York.

There are other parties in San Francisco,Warsaw, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Lisbon, and Portugal (as part of their initial launch).

Facebook Event Link
Celebrate Creative Commons Globally!

You should especially come to this talk because UPenn’s free culture club is kind of short on members and could use some support, which is odd given that most of the freshmen at UPenn supposedly read the book Free Culture over the summer as their freshman reading project. Penn Free Culture founder Steve McLaughlin also wrote an excellent article at the beginning of the semester for the student newspaper, “Free Our Culture: How to Be an Engaged Media Consumer, and Why You Should Care“. Unfortunately that site is loading very slowly right now, apparently because they’re using Haloscan for some reason and Haloscan.com is slow… so I’ll reproduce the piece in full here:

Last weekend, I spent the better part of an evening watching YouTube in a friend’s living room. Five of us gathered around the television, took turns at the helm of a connected laptop and shared what I expect will become an increasingly common form of communal entertainment. Like cowboys telling tall tales around a roaring fire, we each shared the most exciting and outlandish discoveries we had made out there on the virtually ungoverned electronic frontier.

Surfing YouTube is the freest I’ve felt since the early days of Napster. Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not anti-copyright. I mention YouTube because alongside all those Colbert Report clips and Sifl and Olly episodes, a wealth of fantastic user-generated content has found a home (and an audience) online. While many of these videos are fully legal, others flirt with infringement by re-combining sound and footage from copyrighted sources. As the RIAA and others exert increased pressure on YouTube to crack down on such violations, it’s a nagging fear of mine that the creative baby will be thrown out with the copyrighted bathwater.

We all consume culture — film, art, literature, news, music, comics, blogs, etc. For the most part, we like to think that what’s popular is popular because it’s the best — the most engaging, the most intriguing, the most important, the most creative. And on sites like YouTube, this is more or less true. The selection is so vast, the content sources so diffuse, that social filtering sessions like the aforementioned YouTube night are a near necessity. Merit, not marketing, determines what videos get seen. And as a result of YouTube’s commitment to host pretty much any type of content, every niche audience is catered to, and every niche creator gets a chance to find his or her audience. At the current moment, YouTube is a segment of the pop culture landscape that comes as close to full democratic freedom as I’ve ever seen.

And it feels so right.

As a disciple of Lawrence Lessig, I was pleased — thrilled, even — when I heard Free Culture had been chosen for this year’s Penn Reading Project. When my class read The Tipping Point two years ago, it got me thinking in new ways about social networks, the spread of ideas, the processes by which people shape culture and how culture shapes people. Through Malcolm Gladwell I was led to The New Yorker, which led me to new ideas, which led me to more new ideas, etc., etc.

So as a free culture enthusiast, I’ve got a few suggestions for those of you intrigued by Lessig’s ideas. I encourage you to let your own intellectual chain reactions guide you. But for those who only made it to page 30, a brief recap: Lessig frames his argument by claiming copyright law in the United States is intended to nurture a richly creative society — an ideal taken directly from Article I of the U.S. Constitution. That is, copyright law is aimed primarily at protecting creativity, not business interests. Creativity, Lessig argues, develops by building on previous creativity (think of hip-hop artists’ reliance on samples and documentary filmmakers’ reliance on archival footage). But, in the past century, the U.S. Congress has gradually increased the term of copyright protection from a maximum of 28 years (with formal registration and renewal required) to an automatic 95 years of protection for works owned by corporations, or life plus 70 years for the works of individual artists. These changes in the law have come at the direct request of groups lobbying on behalf of entertainment giants such as Disney and Viacom, and there is no guarantee that copyright terms won’t be stretched out indefinitely in order to keep profitable intellectual property from passing into the public domain. Simultaneously, with the rise of digital media, the scope and reach of copyright regulations have also increased (e.g. the digital rights management on files purchased from the iTunes music store).

In addition, copyright law is poorly organized, requiring an inordinate amount of time and effort to acquire the rights to incorporate parts of others’ works in one’s own. At the same time, penalties for copyright violations are inordinately large, often in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for minor infractions. The sum total of these factors is that the little guys are kept out of the mainstream media marketplace, and therefore away from the eyes and ears of the mass public. The way things stand today, only organizations with the financial resources to afford huge legal teams have any reasonable chance of making a substantial impact on mass culture. As Lessig states in the book’s first chapter, “the law’s role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition.”

The essential argument of Free Culture is that an information society must choose between a free (bottom-up) or a feudal (top-down) structure. In Lessig’s view (and mine), a bottom-up culture is preferable to the top-down version fought for by the Disneys and Viacoms of the world. If we strive for a richer and more inclusive public discourse (as opposed to one based on the principle of maximum corporate profit), then copyright restrictions must be loosened.

Lessig goes on to relate the story of his prosecution of the case Eldred v. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court, which unsuccessfully challenged the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Such legal battles are crucial to the long term success of the free culture movement, but if there’s one thing I’d like to stress as a follow-up to Lessig’s book, it’s that for a free culture to reach its maximum potential, more people must expose themselves to more alternative content. I prefer independent media because I find commercial culture consistently inferior: homogeneous, out of touch, packed with ads, boring. But don’t take my word for it. Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), writes on his website shirky.com:

[T]he competitive edge of free content is increasing. In the ’90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth paying for because it would be so hard to find.

In fact, the good stuff is becoming easier to find as the size of the system grows, not harder, because collaborative filters like Google and Technorati rely on rich link structure to sort through links. So offering free content is not just an evolutionary stable strategy, it is a strategy that improves with time, because the more free content there is the greater the advantage it has over for-fee content.

As time passes, freely available content is going to become better, bigger and more varied. Are you in, or are you out?

For now, no matter how exciting it may be, independent media just isn’t promoted the way, say, Smallville is. Therefore, finding an audience takes a little more work on the part of the artist, and finding out what’s good takes a little more work on the part of the consumer. If, as media consumers, we want to open our ears to many voices, this is a necessary burden. So turn off VH1, take a break from MySpace and have a look around at what else is going on out there.

How, you ask? As a fellow college student, I have a few suggestions.

First step to cultural freedom: RSS aggregation.

Do you wish there were an easier way to monitor updates to the vast number of fantastic web sites you come across? Well, practically all sources of regularly updated online content these days (blogs, news, podcasts, comics, etc.) offer what are called RSS feeds, short for Really Simple Syndication. Here’s how it works: You subscribe to as many sites’ feeds as you want through a piece of software (either through a browser or client-side), so the daily content of multiple sites can be corralled in one place and read at your leisure. This way, it’s possible to keep up with what’s happening in corners of the culture that just don’t get mainstream coverage alongside updates from The New York Times and other can’t-miss media outlets. Seriously, this is awesome. I spend way more time on Google Reader than in front of the TV. Wikipedia has full details on RSS for more information.

Second Step: support open source software. How? Use it. Are you using the default AOL Instant Messenger software? Switch to Gaim, one of the many open source alternatives. It provides the same AIM account, same buddy list, minus the ads and with a bunch of extra features (easier on your RAM, too). Still using Internet Explorer? Firefox is better — more customizable and more secure. Windows Media Player? So unwieldy! Use VLC instead. Microsoft Office? OpenOffice will handle all Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files just as well, and it’s completely free. The list goes on and on. If so inclined, you’re free to examine and modify the source code at will. Open source software has come a long way since its inception in the early ’80s, and, due to the aforementioned evolutionary stability of such endeavors, it will only improve in the future.

Third: make something. Lessig’s vision of a free culture thrives on bottom-up participation. Try your hand at making a remix, recording a song, shooting a film, starting a blog, producing a podcast, contributing to a piece of software or writing a Wikipedia article. The possibilities are endless, and a simple Google search will turn up a plethora of free tools and information to help you begin.

What else can you do? If you want to get serious about fighting for free culture, take action. Advocacy groups abound, all searching for as much help as they can get. At the forefront is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which funds legal battles and organizes political action in defense of personal freedoms. Knowledge is a lobbying group focused on relevant legislative goings-on. Another group, Downhill Battle, is centered on music-related issues. And Freeculture.org is a growing outreach organization with chapters at over 30 colleges around the country, including Penn.

If you don’t find activism appealing, you can still promote the ideals of free culture in the long run. As a future lawyer, engineer, businessperson, writer, medical worker, academic — even simply as a voter — take a moment to consider how you might go about nudging the culture in the right direction. With this level of knowledge, you will be able to play an active role in eliminating outdated, restrictive laws and overbearing social norms. YouTube and its competitors offer a little taste of freedom, but so far the model of fully open, democratized content is the exception to the rule in a culture dominated by top-down content.

Free Culture isn’t just a book. It’s a prompt, an encouragement to think clearly about our shared culture and your place in it. As Ivy League kids (especially you Whartonites!), it’s up to us to guide free culture to its tipping point. It’s a safe bet that in 10 or 20 years we’re going to have significantly more cultural leverage than the average group of citizens, so let’s use our power in the best possible way.

Steve McLaughlin is a junior in the College. You can write to him at mclaughs@sas.upenn.edu.

Really, I can’t understand why Lawrence Lessig’s alma mater doesn’t have a healthy Free Culture chapter. Do come help us get Penn Free Culture off the ground!

First, Creative Commons and viral video site Revver have teamed up to spread the CC message and fundraise at the same time. Creative Commons has uploaded several of their best videos to Revver, including new video “Wanna Work Together?”. Normally Revver splits ad revenue from uploaded videos 50/50 with the creator; until the end of the year, however, 100% of the money goes to Creative Commons! So watch some videos, click some ads, and send them around. It’s an easy way to help fundraise.

Second, Creative Commons is hosting a CC Swag Photo Contest! Just take a funky picture of Creative Commons merchandise (t-shirts, stickers, whatever), license it CC-BY, and upload it to Flickr. (Full rules and whatnot are on the contest site.) Each week from now until December 18, Creative Commons will choose a winner and feature their photo on the Creative Commons website. At the end of the contest, two overall winners will each get 100 copies of a CC informational postcard featuring their photo and a personalized voicemail announcement recorded by the Creative Commons board member of his or her choice!

This week’s winner was FreeCulture.org board member Gavin Baker with his CC frisbee. Think you can do better? Get photographin’!

“Online journalism makes a unique contribution to America’s vibrant culture of free speech,” said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Using the Freedom of Information Act is a powerful way to shed light on government activities and foster critical public debate about the discoveries.”

FreeCulture.org supports citizen journalism as part of a free and vibrant media landscape. We believe that all people have the right to open government.

Last March, we organized Blogshine Sunday to highlight bloggers’ experiences gaining access to government information. Efforts like the EFF’s guide will place bloggers and independent journalists on even better footing to hold governments accountable.

After the server crash, our e-mail accounts were not set up correctly and any mail sent to us probably bounced. Our e-mail accounts are back up, so if you were trying to e-mail us before, please try again.

Chapter subdomains were also down, but all of our chapters can now rejoice for their subdomain forwarder addresses should once again be functional.

Mailing lists are the main thing that is still missing, but once we get all of the data from our old server, we should be getting those back up, hopefully by tomorrow.