The National Free Culture Conference will take place on Saturday, May 26 at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

We’re looking to bring together members of free culture chapters, groups working on free culture-related issues, and general supporters of free culture ideas. We’ll have speakers and presenters for the first half of the day and workshops/break-out groups for the second, culminating in a Free Culture party. The official line-up and schedule will be announced shortly, so stay tuned.

Housing is available and the event is open to the public. If you’d like to attend, speak, or help out with the conference, please email freeculture@hcs.harvard.edu or check out our Facebook Event.

See you in Boston!

UPDATE: A tentative schedule follows:

***SCHEDULE***

11:00am — Welcome from Harvard Free Culture

11:15am Discussion 1: Access to Research and Education
Science Commons, Wiki Education, OLPC

12:15 Discussion 2: Code, Freedom, and Control
Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu, Defective By Design

1pm: Interlude — Institute for Infinitely Small Things

1:15 pm LUNCH

2pm Discussion 3: Creating Free Culture
DJ/Rupture, Creative Commons

3pm Chapter/Project/Group Reports

4:30 Working Group Session 1
(a) Open Access, (b) Free Software, (c) Digital Media

5:30 Break

5:45 Working Group Session 2
(a) Activism and Digital Disobedience, (b) Communication and Collaboration, (c) Forming a Vision for Free Culture

6:45 Working Group Reports and Summing up

7:30 DINNER at Various Harvard Square Restaurants

9:30 Dance Conspiracy — Meet by the Harvard Square T

Schedule is subject to change.

UPDATED: The meeting room is L6 at 6 pm on Saturday.

I’m organizing an informal “free culture” caucus at the National Conference on Media Reform this weekend in Memphis, Tenn. Since the conference is large and broad in scope, we want to create an opportunity for people with a particular interest in Internet policy and intellectual property to meet and socialize.

The tentative time of this meeting will be during dinner on Saturday night, 6-8 pm. I’ll ask the conference organizers for a room where everyone can meet at 6 pm, and we’ll move on to a restaurant from there. Details will be posted at the information desk throughout the conference, as well as updated on this post. If you would like me to email or call you when the details are finalized, email me at grbaker@ufl.edu (with your phone number, if applicable).

If you’ll be in Memphis, I hope you’ll join us!

Attention free content creators and wikimaniacs alike: Freeculture.org is co-sponsoring the Wikimania Awards in conjunction with the 2006 Wikimania Conference taking place in Cambridge, MA on August 4-6, 2006. (Shout out to all that would like to attend the conference: register here.)

The Wikimania Awards were created to promote the creation of excellent free content around the world. The authors of such content have made millions of ad-hoc collages, designs, and art exhibits possible. Awards will be given to the best entries in each of nine categories, covering video, animation, audio, photography, and drawing.

Entries must be suitable for some Wikimedia-related project, and must be released under free licenses such as the GFDL or Creative Commons BY-SA or Public Domain Dedication. The full set of rules and submission information is available here.

The closing date for all submissions aside from those created en route to/at the conference is August 1, 2006, so don’t delay. There will be an international and (cyber) star-studded set of judges, along with some great prizes and exposure for the winning entries!

Notes from the entirety of the FreeCulture.org National Summit 2006 are now available on the wiki. Go find your favorite speaker, or else skip straight to checking up on the State of FreeCulture.org as elaborated by Nelson.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Nelson Pavlosky | Mobile: (973)580-7510 | nelson@freeculture.org
Alex Benn | Mobile: (610)308-1770 | abenn1@swarthmore.edu
http://freeculture.org

FreeCulture.org Announces Inaugural Student Summit

A new student movement celebrates its second year of fighting for the “information commons.”

SWARTHMORE, PA — March 27, 2006 — On April 23rd, FreeCulture.org will be two years old. In that time, the fledgling student movement has taken a multi-billion dollar corporation to court (and won), spread to more than thirty college campuses in the United States, and forever changed the way people think about copyright, trademark, and patent law. To mark the occasion, Free Culture is bringing it home with a student summit and rally back where it all started: Swarthmore College, 20 minutes outside Philadelphia. On April 21-23, students from around the country will gather for a weekend to learn, share skills, network, and plan for the future of the movement.

FreeCulture.org co-founder and spokesperson Nelson Pavlosky said: “We’re looking forward to one of the most exciting events since our generation joined the battle to preserve freedom and civil liberties in the digital age.” He continued, “We’re training the next wave of Free Culture activists and organizers, who will continue to take the fight to anyone who would attempt to fence in the information commons.”

Guests will include Free Culture author and Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, Peter Decherney of the University of Pennsylvania, low-power FM experts from Prometheus Radio, Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge, and Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle. Participants will learn everything from campus organizing strategies to FM radio engineering.

Co-founder Luke Smith added: “FreeCulture.org is going to be a force in the copyright debate for decades to come. This conference represents the passing of the torch to a new generation of organizers who will continue to spread the word about Free Culture.” Of the struggle over copyright, he said: “We’re fighting a war in the shadows. The decisions legislators are making now, while no one’s looking, will determine our rights for the next hundred years. Free Culture’s mission is to shine a light into that darkness.”

Attendees can register for the summit at http://freeculture.org/summit2006/. The conference is free and open to the general public, although it is targeted at student activists.

FreeCulture.org is an international student movement dedicated to promoting cultural participation, and protecting the information commons from overly restrictive copyright, patent, and trademark law. Swarthmore students and Free Culture founders Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky successfully sued the electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems in 2003 over their illegal use of copyright to suppress information revealing flaws in their machines. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters around the world inform students about their rights as citizens of the digital age and stakeholders in our common media culture.

# # #

Hello everyone. We are ‘live-blogging’ (nelson’s term) form the Northeast Regional Summit at Columbia University. This is a community effort. Evan says “Pizza was fantastic!” Seth Johnson is here and says “DRM is theft.” We all agree!

Exactly one month from now, you could be attending a party at FreeCulture.org’s first Northeast regional summit!

* Who - If you are a member of a Free Culture chapter, or you are interested in helping to start one at your school, you are invited.
* What - A weekend of networking, brainstorming, planning, and direct action!
* When - January 13-14, Friday afternoon through Saturday evening
* Where - Columbia University’s Lerner Hall in New York City.
* Why - To encourage cooperation among chapter leaders, to promote chapter growth, and to create new initiatives on the local and national level.

For more information, check out the website, and then hurry over to the registration form and reserve yourself a place at our gathering.

UPDATE: Siva Vaidhyanathan has been confirmed as our keynote speaker! Yet another reason to come to our rocking conference.

The time has come to announce our Northeast U.S. regional summit, which will take place in New York City at Columbia University’s Lerner Hall on January 13-14, 2006 (that’s Friday afternoon through Saturday afternoon). If you are a member of a Free Culture chapter, or you are interested in starting one at your school, you are invited. NYU professor and commentator Siva Vaidhyanathan has agreed to be our keynote speaker, and this will be an excellent chance to get involved with FreeCulture.org if you haven’t been before.

This is the first summit since the launch of FreeCulture.org in April 2004 (when no real chapters yet existed). We would like to organize a national/international summit, but that will take significant financial resources due to travel costs, which would prevent many students from attending without travel grants. Therefore, we are organizing regional summits, starting with the Northeast, with plans for California and Southeast, in the hope that since attendees are in geographical proximity, travel costs will be reduced. Perhaps we will find the funds to do a national conference by the end of next semester…

At any rate, I will post again with the website and registration form for this NYC conference very soon. Until then, mark your calendars and save the date!

On Thursday, Nelson Pavlosky will be speaking at the John Hopkins University at the ACM meeting (Association for Computing Machinery). If you’re at JHU, come see him and bring your friends!

Date: Thursday, November 17
Time: 5:00 pm
Place: Shaffer 300
Extra: Free food

Here’s the email that was sent:

“Next time you hear, ‘Don’t touch that dial,’ YOU MAY NOT HAVE A CHOICE”

In 1985, the chief movie industry spokesperson said, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Today, as the Internet and other advances give you the freedom to create music and movies and edit others’ work, the same corporations are trying to pass laws to build a “hands-off” world of passive consumption. Media companies have threatened to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials and launched lawsuits against important works of art. Their laws limit civil liberties and public discourse. Copyright can be an important tool for encouraging creativity, but the industry’s abuse threatens the spirit of exploration and discovery that makes us human.

Nelson Pavlosky will explain the issues at stake in this crisis of law and creativity over FREE MILK AND CEREAL. http://www.acm.jhu.edu/ for more info.

About Nelson Pavlosky:

Pavlosky rose to fame in the digital rights scene by successfully suing Diebold in OPG v. Diebold. In this case, Pavlosky and fellow student Luke Smith fought for the rights to distribute Diebold corporate memos that showed the company defrauded states with its electronic voting machines and botched various elections. The publication of these memos, along with JHU’s Avi Rubin’s report on the insecurity of the voting machines, prompted states like California to file criminal action against the copmany in addition to the general national discussion.

Most recently, Nelson Pavlosky founded the student organization FreeCulture.org to help students fight for their disappearing online rights. He has helped lead several of its campaigns, including Barbie-in-a-Blender Day, Undead Art, and Save The iPod. Together with youth around the world, he fights for copyright reform and freedom of expression, taking advantage of the democratizing power of the Internet and digital technology to help build a more participatory culture.

Two of us from FreeCulture.org will be in attendance at Emory University’s symposium Free Culture and the Digital Library in Atlanta on October 14. Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan are both speaking — it should definitely be interesting. I suggest you move fast if you want to register to attend or there may be no seats left.

If you’re going, send us an e-mail and say hello.