As our loyal readers may know, I visited Free Culture at Virginia Tech on April 23rd, SFC’s 4th birthday. It’s always a pleasure visiting Students for Free Culture chapters because each one is different in subtle (and occasionally dramatic) ways, each one has their own way of approaching free culture activism, and I always learn something new from them. Today I’d like to share with you my observations of FC @ VT and how they go about running an SFC chapter.

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!

As you may already know, Students for Free Culture was in the New York Times on Wednesday (File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints), which made us very happy except for some inaccuracies that crept into the article. Here is the letter to the editor that my fellow Board member Elizabeth Stark sent to the NY Times in response, and which happily was published:

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.

More evidence that good things come in threes:

(1) The FreeCulture.org chapter at the University of Southern California is holding its inaugural meeting this Monday! If you look at our nifty map, you can see how we’re spreading across the country. Although the west coast is still underrepresented, USC will be joining the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, UC Santa Cruz and the five Claremont Colleges in hosting FreeCulture chapters this year. Welcome Free Culture USC!

(2) BoingBoing covered it, which probably resulted in:

(3) FreeCulture USC’s upcoming coverage on Digital Village, a weekly public radio program on KPFK (90.7fm) of Los Angeles. The show starts at 10:00AM PDT on Saturday mornings, and Cameron Parkins, founder of the new chapter, will be interviewed around 10:15. If you’re able to, tune in and cheer him on! (Even if he can’t hear you on the other side of the radio…)

If you’re in the area, try to make it to the event:
Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School, lobby
When: Monday, September 11, 6:30PM
Who: Students, faculty, fellows and affiliates of the University of Southern California

It just keeps going, and going, and going…

The latest issue of Time magazine has an article on Cereality and other cereal cafes. Cereal Solidarity and FreeCulture.org are mentioned (second page) as evidence of a backlash against Cereality’s iron-fisted policing of their business model. The article is mostly sympathetic to Cereality–we kind of come off as loony radicals. But any press is good press, right?

To respond to part of the article:

“Freeculture turned Cereality into a poster child for anti-patent protest,” Roth says. “We’re just two guys trying to protect ourselves from big companies that could steal our intellectual property.”

However absurd the cereal wars may appear, Roth says he is simply trying to act before the really big guys muscle in on his highly expansible idea. “Starbucks could easily start selling cereal, catering to a sophisticated palate, to complement their coffee,” says Laurence Knight, president of Fletcher-Knight, a marketing consultancy based in Greenwich, Conn.”

The problem is that patents were meant to apply to inventions (which need protection to be profitable), not business models (which should produce profit all by themselves). What’s more, they aren’t “property”–they’re a government-granted monopoly, a privilege. It makes about as much sense to say that Cereality should own the idea of having a cereal bar as to say that Jamba Juice should own the idea of having a smoothie bar. (Coincidentally, Cereality sells smoothies, too.)

Cereality sees Starbucks or other big chains as threats, and they’re probably right about that. They have every right to try to grow quickly, create buzz, and use other sound business measures in order to avert that threat. In a competitive market, that’s what you have to do to survive. But Cereality does not have the right to shut others out of the market entirely. That’s just uncool.

In yesterday’s Philadelphia Weekly, on page 18, there’s a picture of me holding a flyer that says “Are you buying a dangerous CD?”

The story, Copy Cats, is another great media clipping covering the antics of FreeCulture.org.

Saturday, we were protesting outside Tower Records on South St.

We believe that the major music labels are using deceptive business practices and stealing legal rights from consumers. They cripple more and more new CDs with digital rights management technologies. In the most egregious case, Sony infected millions of computers by installing malicious, hidden software (a “rootkit“) onto Windows computers of users who merely inserted a Sony music CD.

I have to publicly admit that, even though I am the one pictured, I deserve little credit for the protest. FreeCulture Swarthmore students organized it; I just showed up.

I guess I was the most menacing presence. As noted in the article, I “embarrassed” the other students and pissed off the Tower Records management.

This is just further proof that, for a group dedicated to information policy wonkdom , FCo sure is good at landing earned media.

Update: this story is now also on BoingBoing; here’s the link. Thanks, Cory.
This is cross-posted from ShoutingLoudly.

Nelson and I first met Kai at the “Free Culture Phase 2″ event organized at American University in May 2005, where he was one of the organizers working with AU’s Prof. Kathryn Montgomery in the School of Communications. Kai has also been a writer for Die Gegenwart, a German online magazine; more recently he’s started his own blog, Freihoch3. On Friday he published “The EFF is our mother”, an interview with me on free culture and the free culture movement, as well as FC.o and the international dimensions of free culture activism. Check it out—interview is in English, introduction in German.

Cereal Solidarity is still making headlines, and perhaps deservedly so. The patent office itself has taken notice of our efforts. In the patent examiner’s summary of a telephone interview with Cereality and their lawyers, the patent examiner mentioned the Cereal Solidarity website and asked Cereality to respond to our criticisms!

The Applicants’ claims of novelty and/or unobviousness were discussed related to the above-mentioned prior art and commonly known practices previously in the public domain. PTO personnel presented the Applicants with internet commentaries regarding the subject application (Attachments 1- Cereal Solidarity and 2 - Patent News: Bad Cereal…) and invited commentary. No agreement regarding novelty or unobviousness was reached.

To read this document and maybe some other boring documents (annoyingly the “Non-patent literature” is not posted online), just search for patent # 11/078,686… this quote is on the 6th page of the first document listed. Linking to the document itself is difficult, my apologies.

So as I was saying, our Cereal Solidarity efforts have been mentioned in some mainstream news sources recently, including the Salt Lake Tribune (Cereal Daze: Not Just For Kids) and In These Times (Snap, Crackle… Patents). Bizarrely, In These Times neglected to mention Cereal Solidarity itself, and they unfortunately called us FreeCulture instead of FreeCulture.org, but that’s OK because they interviewed many of our friends such as Jason Schultz from EFF, Kembrew McLeod, and Nicholas Reveille from Downhill Battle.

Also strangely, Gavin started the campaign and has been the driving force behind it, but I (Nelson) ended up being the only person interviewed about it, for the Salt Lake Tribune. Poor Gavin only got a misquote in the UK’s Daily Telegraph ( Bran hits the fan in US ‘cereal café’ wars), where a chunk of the website that Karen actually wrote was placed in his mouth. We were somewhat annoyed at this lack of journalistic integrity, but Karen thought it was funny.

We plan to deliver the petitions soon. Stay tuned!

We’re pleased to see a (mostly) accurate quick gloss on FC.o in USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review. OJR is a high-profile resource both for journalists who are working online, and for online writers and others who have somewhat accidentally found themselves doing journalism.

Here at FC.o, we’re a resource for people with an existing interest in copyright and free culture issues, as well as people who have accidentally found themselves invested in the movement. Our members are artists and musicans, law students and high schoolers, geeks and activists. We’re delighted that OJR chose to spotlight us, since their readership is contending with many of the issues on which we focus.

We’re eager to see more press coverage of free culture issues. Free Culture NYU’s recent appearance in USA Today is one recent example. If you’re aware of others, please share. A robust public conversation about how and why copyright affects everybody is our best foundation for real change.

An update on our Cereal Solidarity campaign: We’ve finished collecting signatures on our No Business Method Patents petition — with over 300 signatures online — and we’re moving on to phase 2.

In the coming days, we’ll be drafting letters to deliver the petition to its targets. We’ll ask Cereality to make nice and withdraw their ridiculous patent application; we’ll ask the Patent Office to reject the patent if Cereality doesn’t; and we’ll ask Congress to eliminate business method patents for good.

In other news, there’s an article about Cereality and Cereal Solidarity in today’s Daily Pennsylvanian, the student paper at the University of Pennsylvania. The article, “Cereality warns potential copycats,” highlights the growth of other cereal bars across the U.S. In other words: lots of people will be in danger if this patent goes through.

The article also talks about Cereality’s trademarks. For the record, let me say that (IMHO and AFAIK) Cereality hasn’t done anything wrong with their trademarks. For instance, the article mentions a café in Iowa called Cerealogy that changed its name to avoid trademark infringement. That seems like a pretty good case to me: the names are rather similar, and there’s probably a good likelihood of consumer confusion, especially considering Cereality calls its employees “cerealogoists”. (If you can show me that the word “cerealogy” has been in general use for a long time, I might change my mind.)

In other words, we’re not anti-Cereality, nor are we anti-”intellectual property” (though we don’t like the term very much). I think Cereality is a good concept, and from what I’ve seen, it looks like a well-run business. We just think Cereality made a mistake when they decided to apply for a patent — and we think business method patents are a mistake all around.

In fact, I’m prepared to throw my support behind Cereality if they withdraw their application and join the growing coalition of voices against business method patents. We don’t want to be confrontational, especially if we don’t have to. I hope Cereality does the right thing.

Our fearless leader recently matched wits with three lawyers on Law Journal TV. FreeCulture.org co-founder Nelson Pavlosky, Temple University law professor Donald Harris, Stephen Meyers from the law firm Drinker Biddle, and Dorothy Bollinger from Fox Rothschild discussed cyberlaw and the Grokster decision in “Downloading Music & Movies Off the Internet: No Free Lunch”.

Video of the show is available online here (streaming Real or Windows Media format only — sorry, it’s not our show!). It’s a pretty intelligent and balanced discussion of the legal issues surrounding free culture. It includes both Nelson and Professor Harris’ arguments for limiting copyright, and Meyers’ points in favor of owners having greater controls. After all, it’s difficult to defend free culture without knowing the arguments in opposition!