FC.o chapters

Tomorrow, Nov 13th 2PM – How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$

2008-11-12T13:58:54+00:00

Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or….
How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$

NYU’s very own Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, New York University, will be speaking at Columbia this Thursday at noon. Gabriella is a talented scholar and friend. This is a great opportunity to see her speak. Details below.

VS.

Thursday November 13: noon - 2:00pm
Columbia University Communications Colloquium
270B IAB (International Affairs Building:
http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/tour/11.html
http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/calendar/

In this talk I present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as ?Internet vs Scientology,? which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of ?Project Chanology,? which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine the culturally antipodal relationship between Scientology and hacker/geek culture. In so doing I will demonstrate how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in unexpected ways in the context of these battles and I will use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today.

Technorati Tags: anon, hackers, GabriellaColeman, Scientology

Steal This Film! Screening w/creator Alan Toner this Sunday Nov 16th.

2008-11-11T14:00:55+00:00

FC NYU is proud to be sponsoring this screening with Computers and Society:

Released in December 2007 by the League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others), Steal This Film 2 tries to go beyond the current discussions around file-sharing to look at what kinds of social change are precipitated by massive changes in our capacity to communicate. The film argues that the changes wrought by networked, peer distribution are historical on the scale of the printing press and tries to explain why.

For many of you these argument will be familiar. These are strange times, in which to many of us the battle already seems to have been won. Yet governments continue to enact harsh laws expanding the scope of copyright protection and increasing sanctions for its infringement, lawsuits are levied against filesharers, fines imposed and arrests made - all intended to destroy or delay what is an inevitable change in how we look at creative work.

At the same time there has developed a burgeoning area of cultural production outside of both the institution of copyright and the historical channels of distribution, be they television, cinema or music stores. Deep beneath the sand the playing field of culture is shifting, in no small part due to the combined actions of millions of peer produsers.

Alan Toner, one of the peers responsible for the film’s production, will be present for a discussion afterwards, during which there will
also be a demonstration of STF’s footage archive.

http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/
http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/
http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film

Sunday, November 16, 2008
7:00pm - 9:00pm

Room 109 Warren Weaver Hall
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY

RSVP on Facebook

Technorati Tags: copyfight, screening, StealThisFilm

Open Access info

2008-10-14T12:49:25+00:00

Happy Open Access Day!

Today’s Daily Nebraskan printed a guest editorial written by Kevin and me. We wanted to use a blog post to back up our editorial and give people access to more information on OA.

The best place to start to learn about OA is Peter Suber. He has produced some amazing resources on the web for learning about open access. His OA Overview is fairly comprehenesive, but those faint of heart might try starting with his Very Brief Introduction to OA. Professor Suber also has a great explanation of what you can do to promote open access from the perspective of faculty, librarians, administrators and students. And for everything you need to keep up-to-date with current events in OA, check Suber’s blog or newsletter.

There are a couple of videos that help explain some of the major OA issues. The first is Professor Suber’s talk to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It’s about an hour and a half long, but totally worth it if you want to understand the growing OA movement on campuses around the country. Here is another interesting video of Sydney Verba, Director of Harvard University Libraries and professor of political science, and Charles Nesson, Professor of Law about why OA makes sense at Harvard.

I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight a couple of OA journal articles that were very helpful in researching this issue. Jessica Litman at Michigan Law has a great article about the “The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing.” In addition, Lawrence B. Solum of Illinois College of Law has a very interesting piece about the shift of academic scholarship to shorter articles with greater access for the public.

There is a great OA wiki run by Simmons College. Some particularly interesting entries include “OA by the numbers,” “OA journal business models,” “Video about OA,” and “University actions” — wouldn’t it be cool for UNL to join the schools on this list.

If you would like to see what a major OA journal looks like, check out the Public Library of Science. PLoS runs a number of science and medical journals but they have one very interesting journal called PLoS ONE. This is an interdiscplinary journal that applies principles from the web 2.0 to academic publishing, allowing for comments and ratings to journal articles. The articles are still peer-reviewed but mainly for accuracy, so that every writing that is technically accurate will be available for users to read, rate, and comment on. This is an interesting approach to apply the long tail to academic publishing.

For anything else you want to know about OA, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a great resource. Check out their OA page for articles, newsletters, forums, brochures, and directories of OA journals.

Thanks to Elaine Westbrooks and Joan Barnes for the UNL-specific numbers in the editorial.

Open Access Day!

2008-10-13T05:43:51+00:00

Please join us on October 14th in Love Library on campus to celebrate Open Access Day. The event is around 2 hours long, starting at 5:30 p.m. and will include presentations by the Dean of Libraries, Other UNL students and faculty, and a webcast that includes world renown scholars. We will be posting a much longer article about the benefits of open access in the days following the presentation, but if you would like to learn more about this exciting movement then come hang out with us on Tuesday night!

Notes for Meeting, 3.13.2008

2008-03-14T09:57:04+00:00

Free Culture movement encompasses:

Copyleft (Creative Commons)

http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#wwt

Cultural environmentalism (Protecting the Public Domain)

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:About

Open educational resources (Curriki)

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Browse

Open content (Allows for Copy/Mod)/ Free content (Available for collaboration, use is not restricted)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

Gratis versus Libre (free as in beer vs. free as in free speech)

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

Digital freedom (Generally to do with the freedom of information - Net Neutrality)

http://savetheinternet.com/

http://freeculture.org/education-law/freeculture_hr4137_hr3746_response.html

HR5353 The Internet Freedom Preservation Act

Proponents of the Free Culture Movement
Lawrence Lessig
http://lessig.org/
Jimmy Wales
http://wikipedia.com

MEETING: Thursday, March 13, 9:30PM

2008-03-12T21:21:24+00:00

Please join Brown Free Culture for our first meeting of the semester this Thursday evening at 9:30PM in Production 1, 151 Thayer Street (corner of Benevolent and Thayer)!

Agenda and other info coming soon.

Save Internet Radio!

2007-04-13T18:46:05+00:00

Listen to KSPC's online stream or Pandora? Like being able to stay in touch with your favorite radio station from home (in my case 89.3 The Current) while at school in Claremont? Concerned about media consolidation and democratic values?

Then you should care about this.

Under heavy pressure from the RIAA, the Copyright Royalties Board has set new royalty fees far more costly than any current webcaster could ever hope to afford. The new technology of Internet radio, so necessary given the ClearChannel monoculture of terrestrial radio these days, is in danger of being squashed. Not because Internet radio isn't profitable, left alone--because the new fees far exceed both their revenues and the fees paid by their terrestrial radio competitors! The new fees make it so that only huge media corporations like AOL, which could eat those exorbitant costs, could afford to host Internet radio stations--and this was the intention of the RIAA who lobbied for it:

Internet radio has to pay a type of copyright fee that terrestrial radio does not.

Why? What justifies this difference? Was there any study of the economic consequences from Internet radio that would justify these differences? Was the motive to protect artists against piracy?

In a rare bit of candor, one RIAA expert admitted what seemed obvious to everyone at the time. As Alex Alben, vice president for Public Policy at Real Networks, told me,

“The RIAA, which was representing the record labels, presented some testimony about what they thought a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller, and it was much higher. It was ten times higher than what radio stations pay to perform the same songs for the same period of time. And so the attorneys representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, ... “How do you come up with a rate that’s so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish the market rate, and if you set the rate so high, you’re going to drive the small webcasters out of business. ...”

And the RIAA experts said, “Well, we don’t really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it’s a stable, predictable market.” (Emphasis added.)

Translation: The aim is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that this platform of potentially immense competition, which would cause the diversity and range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to the dinosaurs of old. There is no one, on either the right or the left, who should endorse this use of the law. And yet there is practically no one, on either the right or the left, who is doing anything effective to prevent it.
-- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

Want to do something about this travesty of politics?

Read about Radio Paradise, a prominent webcaster in danger of being legislated out of business, and its fight against the new rates.

Read user testimonials and other information at Save Our Internet Radio.

There are two petitions going around: one here and the other here. You should sign them!

To find your representatives and send them dead tree mail, click here.

Face 2 Face : Peer 2 Peer

2007-03-31T05:18:32+00:00

Hey, it's another event! Free Culture 5C will be hosting a Face 2 Face Peer 2 Peer mixtrade/flash mob/etc event on Sunday, April 1. (No, not an April Fool's joke. :) ) We'll be burning mixes of our favorite music and giving them to others in exchange for new mixes and new music we've never heard! I may bring some media kits, stickers, and other assorted surprises as well. The event's at 3 PM at Walker Beach at Pomona (see our graffiti on the wall advertising the event). Come one, come all! And bring your friends!

Some open source CD burning programs:

InfraRecorder (Windows)

Burn (Mac)