This morning, Tim Hwang of Harvard Free Culture posted a provocative critique and vision statement for the future of SFC. Recognizing that “times have changed”, Tim challenges us to consider our role as student activists in today’s salient tensions lest this organization lapse into “irrelevance.” In particular, he suggests four actions to address areas of concern that have not yet received our attention at a national or international level;

1) Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works

2) Connect With the Development Community

3) Encourage Open Access Nationally

4) Promote Data Portability

Tim’s blog post is the perfect starting point for a discussion that we both hope to see carried out in person at October’s conference. I urge you to take a few minutes to read his thoughts and offer your reaction. The conversations around free culture continue to change and so must we.

Critical game-making collective Molleindustria have just announced the release of their webgame Free Culture Game, which is a “game about the struggle between free culture and copyright”. Molleindustria, based in Italy, have made a series of games about social issues, such as Enduring Indymedia, a commentary on the FBI’s seizing of computers owned by citizen media group Indymedia, and McVideogame, a critique of the industrial practices of food giant McDonalds.

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Last year, Students for Free Culture participated in the National Open Access Day of Action, as part of a successful push to pass the NIH bill. This year, we’re doing it again: together with allies SPARC and PLoS, SFC has signed on to 2008 Open Access Day, celebrating our progress in opening access to research and pushing for further gains.

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!

Do you have a project or group you’d like to exhibit at the Free Culture conference this October? There will be on-going exhibition space for which we can provide you with a table, chairs, and power. Space is limited, however, so please put your name up on the Exhibits and Booths wiki page soon.

In other conference notes, the conference wiki is lighting up! In particular, I started a Friendly Couches page for travellers to coordinate low-cost, hi-fun lodging.

In recent weeks, the iPhone has made quite a stir because of the regulatory decisions made by Apple. Jonathan Zittrain raised this worry in his book, The Future of the Internet, where he cautioned that generativity - the nature of systems to accept input from everyone - was being traded for sterile appliances - devices which do only simple tasks (GPS, TiVo).

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]

Last weekend, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple has built a “kill-switch” into every iPhone to terminate any “malicious or inappropriate” programs that somehow got through their application screening process.  Of course, nobody but Steve Jobs knows what “malicious or inappropriate” means, or who decides what qualifies, but this is just another way that Apple is showing the possible downside of a highly centralized and proprietary platform.

(By contrast, I assure you that not only does the FreeRunner have no kill-switch, but even iPhones that are jailbroken through less sanctioned means are not subject to the same remote control.)

This revelation by Steve Jobs shouldn’t surprise anybody, as it’s in line with the traditional Apple walled-garden philosophy, but it still represents a major step in the wrong direction.  By asserting absolute central control over iPhones in the wild, Apple has solidified the iPhone’s status as a “tethered” device, and mark Jonathan Zittrain’s words, tethering is like DRM but worse.

There are a lot of things that are appealing about the iPhone for both users and developers: it’s a beautiful, shiny device, it’s in a lot of people’s hands, and it has a lot of killer features that aren’t in any other popular devices.  But really, allowing this tethering to happen without protest strongly sends the wrong message to tech manufacturers.  And if we’re quiet about tethering now, it will be a lot harder to kill it later.

One of the big issues that’s come up recently on the Free Culture national list is the desire to promote increased outreach and collaboration on international development issues. The Free Culture agenda is far from limited to the developed world issue that have been the subject of our high-profile actions in recent years, and there’s a world of possibilities for FC to create real change. Access to medicines, knowledge, and culture are an important places for activism as Free Culture plans the next step.

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.

I’ve been listening to the new Girl Talk album, and I must say that it is effing brilliant. For the uninitiated, Girl Talk is an engineer-turned-artist named Gregg Gillis who creates music by remixing samples of others’ songs without getting permission first. If you haven’t heard his stuff, stop what you’re doing right now and visit his MySpace page for a listen.

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.

Free Culture News is a short form news blog. The format is simple: brief summary, quotes, 2cents of commentary, links to other sources - similar to Boing Boing or Slashdot. Reading it is an easy way to keep up on FC related issues. It was started by Conley of Free Culture at Virginia Tech. Their chapter use to post news up on their wiki every week, and use these stories as starters for chapter discussion. The blog is an out growth of their wiki, with a focus on sharing those stories with the larger Free Culture community. The stories are not student specific and cover everything from net neutrality and OLPC to fair use and open access scholarly publishing.  I recommend giving it a try.

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.