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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?

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

What sorts of things will go in?

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

What does the Journal Need? (non-exhaustive)

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

Where can I learn more and contribute?

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

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”

One of the English language’s most recognized and performed songs is Happy Birthday to You (HBTY), which likely first appeared between 1893 and 1912 as new age-grading standards in American schools increased the need for a common celebratory song. Historian Elizabeth Pleck’s work shows birthday parties as a common practice had only come into vogue around the 1830s, while confection-lovers would wait another 20 years before the modern birthday cake emerged in the 1850s. HBTY is a derivative work combing generally-assumed-to-be-folk lyrics with the tune of Good Morning to All (GMTA) a melody written by and copyright to Mildred J. Hill in 1893. The original GMTA lyrics were penned by her sister, Patty Smith Hill.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

On the White House blog Tom Kalil and Aneesh Chopra are drawing attention to the role that students have in creating innovative online services that drive America forward. Noting the technologies and services as broad as Mosaic and Google that have come from students, they propose:

“an initiative that would cultivate, with student involvement, such a wave of innovation. Although it’s impossible to predict what the next generation of applications will be, universities, companies, and students could work together under such an initiative, which would serve as a sort of “Petri dish” where new ideas could incubate and grow.”

In our net neutrality FCC filing, the Board of SFC made similar points:

Network neutrality is also important to the United States as it struggles to emerge from the current recession and maintain its position as one of the world’s most innovative economies. The centrality of the Internet to students goes beyond the use of Twitter or MySpace. It even goes beyond the application of technology to learning and scholarship. Students can, and do, play an exciting role in American entrepreneurship. One need look no further than the enormously successful examples of Google and Facebook – innovative companies that came from the creativity and persistence of students who had access to a high-quality, open Internet. A transparent and non-discriminatory network removes barriers to entrepreneurs, be they students or otherwise.

Kalil and Chopra encourage students and others to write to broadband@ostp.gov to suggest ideas for how the broadband grant money should be spent.

What are your ideas for promoting student innovation?

Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration’s intellectual property enforcement coordinator (“IP Czar”) is undertaking a serious review of American intellectual property enforcement policy. To her credit, she is asking for public input on how they should approach their task, though much of the document makes erroneous assumptions about the need for “enhanced enforcement” and the unmitigated “harms to the American economy” from intellectual property infringement. The economic reality that too much intellectual property actually harms the American economy is not present in the request for public information, making our job and input even more important.

The input should take two parts:

In the first, the IPEC seeks written submissions from the public regarding the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from intellectual property violations, and the threats to public health and safety created by infringement. In the second part, the IPEC requests detailed recommendations from the public regarding the objectives and content of the Joint Strategic Plan and other specific recommendations for improving the Government’s intellectual property enforcement efforts. Responses to this request for comments may be directed to either of these two parts, or both, and may include a response to one or more requests for information found in either part.

Submissions are due on or before Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 5 p.m. and should be directed to intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov.

In the meantime, what topics and approaches should we, as a community, cover?

[Via BoingBoing]

ARPAnet Interface message processor (IMP), BBN, 1967

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering adopting national rules to protect the open Internet. On January 13, the FCC is hosting a public workshop at MIT that will include some of the founders of the Internet alongside entrepreneurs, technologists, and policymakers (see agenda and panelist bios below).

On one hand, the workshop is an opportunity for community members to hear experts discuss the features of the Open Internet that are important to preserve.

But much more crucially, this workshop is an opportunity to enter your questions, thoughts, concerns, and suggestions into the public record. The FCC will use this information in its decision-making process. Your contributions to this workshop will have have a significant impact on the course of action that the FCC ultimately takes.

Think about it: how does the Internet’s openness affects your ability to work, study, create, and communicate? On what network features do you rely? What have you done with it? What do you hope to do in the future?

There is no doubt that large corporations (like the newly-merged Comcast/NBC Universal) have organized lobbyists to register their interests. Free culture is not their priority.

Who will lobby on behalf of the student, the fan, the hacker, the gamer, and the entrepreneur?

The FCC needs to hear your voice.

Innovation, Investment, and the Open Internet

• January 13th, 2010
• 4:30 pm EST
• MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater
• Streaming: http://www.openinternet.gov/workshops
• Agenda/ bios: http://wiki.freeculture.org/FCC_Workshop_January_13

If you are local to Boston, please come in person. If you can’t make it at 4:30, it is OK to come late. Simply showing up is a powerful demonstration of the concern that exists among everyday internet users.

The following is a guest post from Nick Shockey of SPARC.

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

Whether it be improving one’s own health, finding more efficient fuels or better understanding far-flung parts of the world, access to scholarship is essential to improving our society. Too often, though, that knowledge is locked behind pay-walls that place it out of the reach of most of the world’s population.

In an effort to make academic publications more accessible, AcaWiki has been created. Billing itself as the “Wikipedia for academic research,” AcaWiki allows scholars to post summaries of their work on a site that aims to foster discussions. This is a great way to help build the academic commons. So, if you’re a researcher or academic, consider posting summaries of your work. If you’re a student, turn to AcaWiki when researching.

As you undoubtedly know, college campuses are, in many ways, ground zero for the battles being waged for the future of intellectual property. The thousands of Americans that have been sued by the entertainment industry in the past few years include countless students who were accused of illegally downloading music.

Although the lawsuits may have stopped, the entertainment industry lobbyists are still set on using any means necessary to stop music “piracy” – oftentimes regardless of the unintended consequences. One of those efforts was included in a 2008 law entitled the Higher Education Opportunity Act which requires institutions of higher learning to take a number of steps to protect the business models of the entertainment industry.

Earlier this week, EDUCAUSE hosted a very informative webcast about how to comply with these P2P provisions. What follows is a summary and some thoughts on what students can do at their school.

The P2P Provisions

Gregory Jackson of EDUCAUSE outlined the requirements of the law. Essentially there are:

1. An annual disclosure to students that copyright infringement subjects them to civil and criminal liabilities, a summary of the Federal penalties for copyright infringement, and a description of the school’s policies for copyright infringement.
2. The development of plans to effectively combat unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, including educating the community, procedures for handling transgressions, and employing at least one technological deterrents (such as bandwidth shaping, traffic monitoring, vigorously responding to DMCA notices, and 3rd party commercial products).
3. Offer, to the extent practical, legal alternatives to P2P downloading, as determined by the institution.

There are some good pieces: the law is explicit in the individual autonomy and authority of schools in deciding the particularities of their plan (though it is obviously mandatory to comply); furthermore, none of these requirements should “unduly interfere” with the educational and research use of the network.

The Role of Students

Although this law, which in many ways turns our schools into private copyright cops for the entertainment industry, was largely crafted without the input of one of the largest constituencies – students – there is still room for us to be involved.

Schools have until July of next year to finalize their plans for compliance. There is a wide latitude for many of the provisions, oftentimes ranging from minimally objective to overtly troublesome. Administrators who may feel pressure to over-comply need to be reminded of the interest of their students in maintaining an open and enabling network.

Oftentimes, school policy-makers are happy to hear from students. At the University of Michigan, their innovative BAYU system (which alerts students they are uploading) was crafted with support of the student government and is very popular. This is a promising procedural and product model for other schools to examine.

Obviously, there are many worrisome parts of this law – privacy concerns due to network monitoring, stiffing of speech through the overuse of DMCA take-downs, and the high costs of compliance, to name three. Therefore, it is especially important that student voices are heard on this topic.

Reach out to the administrators and technologists on campus – they’re only an email away – offering your help and reminding them how important it is to get these questions correct.

[If you are especially interested in university network policy, be sure to get involved with the Open University Campaign's effort to promote open networks at schools around the world.]

As many of you know, following the Free Culture 2008 Conference, Students for Free Culture began the Open University Campaign – an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education. With the academic year about to begin, we want to invite all interested parties to assist the with project; after all, we wouldn’t be very genuine if we didn’t do this in an open manner ourselves!

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!