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!

Well, crap, guys. How did we let this one slip by?

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

Something I’ve been thinking about lately – what role should Free Software play in Free Culture?

Who am I? I’m Matt Lee – a comedian, comic book artist and author. I’m also a free software hacker.

Is Free Culture the combination of Free Art and Free Software and some other things? FreeCulture.org and the students of the United States have a golden opportunity to set an example here, by switching to using only Free Software.

A potentially controversial statement, and it should be clear that my views might not represent those of FreeCulture.org.

Some notes came out of the National Conference about Free Software and it was great to see the Free Software Foundation and Defective By Design represented.

Anyway, I thank Nelson and the FreeCulture.org gang for giving me the opportunity to post this. Give me your feedback by email – mattl at gnu dot org or find me on IRC – mattl.

I read via a Public Knowledge blog post that Apple is going to sell music from a major label in a non-DRM’d format. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, software that restricts what your computer will let you do with music you typically have paid for. For example, the DRM on the iTunes Music Store prevents synchronizing full-quality files to portable music players other than the iPod.

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?

Freeculture.org is pleased to announce the contest winners for our Down With DRM video contest. We had a lot of great entries, and want to thank *all* of the participants for their submissions. They’ve all contributed greatly to raising awareness in the fight against DRM.

And the winners are (in no particular order):

The winners will all receive a Neuros OSD digital video recorder. Thanks again to Neuros for providing our wonderful prize and to Defective By Design for the support!

So check out the videos, rate them, and send them to your friends to help put an end to DRM.

Enter the Down with DRM video contest for a chance to win a Neuros OSD – a portable digital VCR! (Thanks jborn.)

Joining in Oct 3rd – Day Against DRM, Free Culture will select the 5 best anti-DRM video entries and award a Neuros OSD to each creator. DefectiveByDesign.org is also looking to air selected anti-DRM videos on their website during the week of October 3rd, and we want to give them a hand.

Here are the official rules to enter Free Culture’s Down with DRM Video Contest:

• Deadline for submissions: Sunday, October 1 at 11:59pm EDT

• Criteria for video:
  • Anti-DRM themed
  • Short
  • Video, animation, or remix
  • Make it catchy — we want these videos to be viral
• Please submit your video to the online video sharing network(s) that you prefer. Here are some examples:
  • http://www.archive.org
  • http://www.youtube.com
  • http://www.revver.com
  • http://www.blip.tv
• Please tag your video with “downwithdrm” and “dbdoct3″so that people can search for it.
• Preference will be given to submissions under free content licenses such as Creative Commons BY-SA, BY, PD, or the Free Art license.
• E-mail downwithdrm@freeculture.org with a link to your video by October 1 at 11:59pm EDT.
• Free Culture will select the top 5 entries and award the winners with a Neuros OSD (one per video).

UPDATE: We have announced the winners of the contest!

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.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign our pledge to boycott DRM. The deadline is 6 February, just a few days away.
In under 1 month, nearly 3,500 people have pledged to never buy a CD with DRM. We far surpassed our initial goal of 500, but the more signatures, the stronger the message to the music industry. Please join us and pledge to boycott DRM—and ask your friends to do the same.

Join us in our new Pledgebank pledge to boycott DRM:

DRM severely restricts our rights as users, creators, and members of the global community. We will not stand by and let fair use grow extinct as a consequence of poorly thought out technology and the laws that support it.

It’s really absurd that the content industry wants to penalize people who are buying legitimate CDs by restricting what they can do with the products they can buy, and we should not support this behavior.