FreeCulture.org - Students for Free Culture

SFC supports the Student Statement on The Right to Research

Kevin Driscoll — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:42:00 +0000

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) issued a statement today urging students and other members of the academic community to support Open Access to research:

Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them.

The full text of the statement is available at www.righttoresearch.org and will serve as a terrific starting point for discussions of Open Access issues. Forward it to your chapter members and bring it up at the next meeting. Use it in conversation with faculty at your school.

Of all the work we’re engaged with on our campuses, Open Access to research may be our nearest victory. Keep the momentum going!

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For Free Culture…

Kevin Donovan — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:22:46 +0000

As you undoubtedly know, President Obama has led an unprecedented era of openness in American governance, and although the record is mixed, there is much reason for hope. One of the more interesting examples of participatory government that has emerged has been the crowdsourcing of citizen input during the transistion period where Americans could submit feedback for the newly elected administration and others could vote for their favorites.

Now, the Office of Public Enagagement has published a PDF of the top suggestions (also available online). It provides a zeitgeist of sorts for the American public, and, excitingly, many of the topics are related to our work at Students for Free Culture.

A couple commenters desired increased access to knowledge (A2K):

Libraries of all types need our support, 10810 points

“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of thegreatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from allour history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to thecollective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth ofour awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all betested by how well we support our libraries.” ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Carl said it best. Please continue and expand upon the support provided to libraries of all types.

– NJ Busch

and

Create an online E-Library, 8100 points

Start a program scanning the library of congress into an online library where it can be accessed for free. It would make it so much easier and cheaper for public/ school libraries to offer the people they serve quality access to knowledge. Going hand in hand with the plan already in place to drastically expand broadband lines and invest in 21st century schools, this would do much to improve American education while making it more cost effective. It would also save money and the enviornement by reducing the amount of paper purchased by the government when stocking multiple libraries with the same books.

– Kevin J. Kauth

While others pointed to the need for supporting innovation and creativity:

Focus on the Art and Creativity, 12970 points

It is always the arts that are first to be cut back in our schools and communities, yet the arts are

at the very center of creativity. This is where creative skills are born, not just for artists and musicians, but for scientists, engineers, researchers, innovators, and all thinking peoples. Now, if ever, is the time when we need creative thought and creative action to find the means and the human energy and spirit to find our way out of the problems that face us.

– Maples

and

Expand Small Business Innovation Programs, 6550 points

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program has been providing near-term growth with long-term benefits for many years now. It is an established yet dynamic program created and administered by the federal government.

Because the program administration and guidelines are already in place, an expansion of the program could be accomplished almost overnight, perhaps by merely generalizing a previous Executive Order (for example, 13329).

– Next Generation

Others encouraged more technology-enabled transparency:

people talking to government, 41740 points

One of the problems with politcs is that the people’s voice isn’t heard. This website is amazing! Please expand this so that people can vote on things that congress votes on. This will show congress what the constituants want. You can have the people vote on items and then show how their congress people voted on the same issue. It’s been too long that a small, disconected group of people control the lives of the US population. The American people have NOT stood up. Expand this website so that the people’s voice can be heard again. Great job with change.gov.

WE WANT MORE!

– aDAM

and

Honesty and Transparency, 45610 points

Whatever the issue — economy, energy, forgein policy, health care, homeland security, or other – it is most important that honesty and transparency guide the debate. In communicating with the American people, the President and his representatives must remain true to the principles of honesty and transparency.

– GeneL

and

Vote and debate all bills online and show what industries contribute the most to each Representatives campaign, 40080 points

Vote and debate all bills online and show what industries contribute the most to each Representatives campaign while they are voting. Let’s show the American people who really run the country!

– JimBO

Some people called for the government to provide for open technological platforms:

National WiFi, 23540 points

Internet access in the new emerging world and culture needs to be a right and not a privilage. Those who cannot afford broadband access will be left behind dispreportionately. Broadband Internet Access needs to be avalible to all Americans and most especially to those who can’t afford it. Let’s make this a priority.Further National WiFi access will broaden new business opportunities in a new emerging economy. Americans could have cell phones that have no service fees, internet access at any location and the ability to be in contact with anyone or anything instantly. The possibilites are endless.

– Jesse E

and

Restore Net Neutrality Protections to the Internet, 46220 points

During the campaign, Barack Obama pledged to “take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality” and to “protect the Internet’s traditional openness to innovation and creativity and ensure that it remains a platform for free speech and innovation that will revitalize our democracy.” The administration can show it’s commitment by working with the new Congress and FCC to pass laws that make Net Neutrality the cornerstone to protecting innovation, free speech and choice on the Internet.

– TimKarr

Finally, many people recognized the need to protect civil liberties, such as privacy:

Find a Balance Between US Security and Civil Liberties, 15660 points

With the reversal of many civil liberties by the Bush administration in the past eight years in the name of Terrorism, we need to find a balance between protecting our country without giving up our cherished rights as American Citizens. I am hoping a balance can be met without giving agencies carte blanche and no oversight.

– Admiralu

There are certainly points for disagreement on the particulars of these proposals, but as a general impression of the importance and widespread interest in the topics that matter to Students for Free Culture, this is an encouraging sign that the tides of public opinion are recognizing the importance of innovation, transparency, civil liberties and the role that technology can have in promoting those.

Now, it would seem, the question is what can Free Culture do for your country?

Work for Creative Commons as a Software Engineer

Fred Benenson — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:28:13 +0000

As you may or may not know, Creative Commons (full disclosure: CC is my current employer) frequently looks to Students for Free Culture when hiring for openings and new positions. Right now, CC is currently employing at least 4 once-students who have been involved in SFC, so if you’re helping out with your chapter and think you’re a fit, you should definitely consider applying for the position:

Creative Commons is hiring a software engineer for our technology team, based in San Francisco. The ideal candidate would have experience in a few key areas (Python, Linux, web development) and the ability to learn quickly. Interest in the semantic web doesn’t hurt, either. We’ll begin reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews May 15, 2009.

See the job description for application details, and good luck!

Reminder: Campaigning for SFC Board09 Closes in 5 Days!

Christina Ducruet — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:28:47 +0000

Hello SFC,

The campaigning period for SFC Board Elections 2009 will close at Midnight PDT on April 5.

This is a reminder to candidates to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page. Remember, your statement can include any information that highlights your candidacy and any other offering to the SFC constituency. Look at these prompts if you are just getting started.

Anyone in the SFC community can still add to the open list of questions, thoughts or concerns to candidates for SFC Board09. This is a great opportunity to bring up specific issues that interest you - just make sure you take advantage while there is still time for the candidates to respond!

Voting begins on April 6, 2009 - more details to follow.

For additional information on the 2009 SFC Board Election: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board09/Election

Tim Hwang on the Changing Battlefield for Freedom Online

Kevin Donovan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:07:49 +0000

Tim Hwang has a way of clearly articulating the path forward for Free Culture. Tim, formerly of Harvard Free Culture and now a Berkman Center researcher, recently gave a talk up at the University of Alberta that in many ways is a follow-up to his blog post prior to Free Culture 2008 that probed the future of Students for Free Culture.

In it, Tim posits that the copyfight - the effort started by Stallman, expanded by Lessig & traditionally undertaken by Students for Free Culture - is largely over. There are certainly important issues still at play in that cause, but as Tim explains in the speech here and slides below, the cause of digital freedom has evolved to include much more.

The Changing Battlefield for Freedom Online

View more presentations from Tim Hwang.

Three important changes in the digital ecosystem have given rise to new issues. In Tim’s thoughtful reckoning, cloud computing, increased bandwidth and broad web services have drastically changed the battle from one of well-structure copyright to one that involves previously unconsidered challenges including:

Privacy, interoperability and portability
Filtration
Access to knowledge

As he notes, the Open University Campaign has positioned SFC to deal with many of these new battles for online freedom, but as we continue to move forward, it will be important to bear in mind the lessons Tim outlines. So take a listen and chime in with your comments!

Free Culture 2008: Post-Mortem

Ben Moskowitz — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:17:53 +0000

It’s been about six months since the Free Culture 2008 Conference—time flies! Berkeley is happy to report that the conference was a great success. We got some good press, made some great connections, and generated a little money for the national organization. We were also treated to a barn-burner of a talk by Larry Lessig and finally got everyone together in one room. We’re so grateful to everyone who made the trip and can’t wait for the next event; we hope you had as much fun in the Bay Area as we do on a regular basis. Get hyphy.

What follows is an extremely tardy wrap-up post—call it a post-mortem. Many folks wondered where to find resources, so read on to see what’s available online.

Videos of the conference are now available in three ways. First, check out Free Culture @ Berkeley’s Blip channel (http://freecultureberkeley.blip.tv). Like any good video site, Blip will let you embed the videos on your blog and also download them for archival. They’re available in OGG at archive.org—search “free culture.” Alternately, you can check out FreeCulture.tv on Miro. The videos are licensed CC-BY, so go nuts—spread them all over the world, chop and screw them, burn them on DVDs and sell them. Just make sure SFFC gets a shout out. If you’d like source files, drop us a line at berkeley@freeculture.org.

Also, Alaskan FC-warrior Jacob Caggiano has some great interviews from the conference up on his Vimeo page.

Some great summary posts were written by Tim Hwang, Kevin Donovan, and others (if you’re ever in Mexico and need a Spanish translation of Lessig’s speech, look no further).

Lastly, you should also check out the fc2008 Flickr pool (just watch out: we share #hashtags with FurryCon 2008). I’m particularly fond of the lewd dancing at the afterparty—thanks again to Lone Wolf, ripley, Kid Kameleon, and Refusenik for spinning on the one’s and two’s.

By now everyone who needs reimbursement for travel should have received a check. If you haven’t, contact berkeley@freeculture.org and we’ll check the status. We apologize again for the delay in processing; the travel grants made possible by our generous sponsors Google and Mozilla required that we work with UC Berkeley’s business services, resulting in a longer-than-average reimbursement period. It’s definitely something that SFFC will be working to improve on for future events.

Speaking of future events—it’s about the right time to start plotting the next one. What should we focus on? Who should be there? What are our goals? Speak your mind in the comments!

(photocred: thanks, mecredis!)

Nominations Open for 2009 SFC Board Election!

Christina Ducruet — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:49:33 +0000

Hello SFC!

Nominations for the 2009 SFC Board Election have officially opened! Please see the following details about who is eligible to be nominated, how to nominate, and what to do if you are a nominee:

Who is eligible?

In order to be a candidate for the SFC Board, nominees must either be a current member of a SFC chapter or currently serving on the Board, per our Bylaws.

How to nominate someone:

Let the person you are nominating know that you are doing so. Then, visit the Nominations page to make your nomination official by filling out the nominee’s information using the template provided.

To accept a nomination:

Once your sponsor has added your information to the wiki, you can accept the nomination by updating your bio and statement. In order for your nomination to be considered accepted, you must write at least “Nomination Accepted” before the close of nominations at Midnight PDT on March 20, 2009.

On campaigning etc.

Nominees will have until April 5th to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page. The statement is an open forum for information relevant to your candidacy and an opportunity to address questions, thoughts or concerns from the SFC community to board nominees.

Nominations close at Midnight PDT on March 20, 2009.

For additional information on the 2009 SFC Board Election, including the updated schedule: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board09/Election

Law of the Commons Seminar

Brian Rowe — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:48:44 +0000

One day conference dedicated to the commons! This event brings together both the commons movement in the copyright realm and the commons movement in the environmental realm to discuss the history and future of the commons and a legal systems that can protect or harms the commons.

This seminar stitches together many different threads of the commons: the historical perspective in a contemporary context, creative and artistic commons, software and “intellectual property” including patenting of life forms, personal and political commons, natural resources, media and telecommunications commons. The seminar beckons to lawyers, professors and judges whose legal training is framed by property rights and human rights, computer geeks and “techies,” humanists, political activists, food activists, and creative communities of various stripes.

Speakers include:
Eben Moglen- Founding Director, Software Freedom Law Center, Columbia School of Law
Margaret Chon - Professor for the Pursuit of Justice Seattle University School of Law and active member of the A2K movement
Cindy Cohn - Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Laura Nader - Professor University of California Berkeley
Brian Rowe - Students for Free Culture Activist and Founder Freedom for IP
Beth Elpern Burrows - The Edmonds Institute
Nives Dolšak - Associate Professor University of Washington
Mark Leier - Professor Simon Fraser University
Robert Siegal - Center for Social Justice
Peter Linebaugh - Professor University of Toledo
Louis E. Wolcher - University of Washington School of Law
Steven A. Reisler - Steven A. Reisler PLLC and NLG Activist

Location:
Seattle University School of Law
1191 E. Columbia
Sullivan Hall, Corner of 12th at E. Columbia
Seattle, WA 98122-1090

Date: Friday March 13th

The cost to Students is free!
Read more at the Law of the Commons Web Site

Intern at Creative Commons this summer

Asheesh Laroia — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 04:00:32 +0000

While I am the Web Team leader at freeculture.org, I’m also a software engineer at Creative Commons. With that hat on, let me invite the students for free culture community to intern with CC in San Francisco.
Jennifer Yip writes on the main CC blog:

CC’s popular summer internship positions are now posted on the Opportunities page! We are looking for motivated students who can spend the summer at the San Francisco office to work with the staff on various projects. This year, we are offering technology, legal, international outreach, and graphic design/media development positions. Please spread the word to qualified students, or apply yourself! We are accepting applications now through March 13th.

The internship is a great way to see San Francisco, contribute your skills (be they in software, law, outreach, or graphic design) to the high-profile projects at Creative Commons. Also, a quick look through the staff page will show you that a good proportion of our current staff started as interns. We do offer interns compensation, which for me was enough to live in San Francisco for a summer and take home a little pocket money. I really appreciated applying my programming skills outside of school; suddenly, my projects don’t all disappear at the end of the semester but continue to support cause of Free Culture.

Get in touch with Jennifer if you have more questions, and be sure to apply by March 13! (You can talk to me, too, but I’ll mostly only know about the technology internship.)

Last.fm: privacy invasion or site of resistance?

Kevin Driscoll — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:30:47 +0000

Last Friday, TechCrunch posted an article provocatively titled, Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?. Based on a friend-of-a-friend tip, the piece alleged that Last.fm had “handed over” user data to facilitate the identification of U2 fans with leaked copies of the band’s forthcoming album, No Line on the Horizon. (This was before Universal Music Group copped to leaking the album and U2 started streaming it voluntarily.)

Within an hour and a half - midnight for the London-based Last.fm - the allegations were debunked. Employees responded to concerned readers directly,

“[Last.fm would] never personally identify our users to a third party.”

Last.fm’s reputation is saved, TechCrunch are lying liars, the RIAA still sucks, and then I found five dollars. Right?

Not quite. Last.fm, purchased by CBS Interactive in 2007, represents the tension driving this era in computing culture, a constant negotiation of value and privacy. I’ll enrich your database by telling you how many times I’ve rewound Las Mulas De Moreno today (five and counting) and you tell me about similar artists to obsess over tomorrow.

Billboard and Soundscan look like halfblind guesswork in comparison with the charts made possible by this kind of deep data collection. Last.fm’s revenue may draw largely from advertising but if they were to start selling custom data packages to interested corporations, would anyone stop scrobbling?

Like many FCers, I was initially so alarmed at the notion that Last.fm would “hand over” user data that I ignored the fact that Last.fm’s core operations are basically in a constant state of dry snitching on its users. Want to know who is listening to “Las Mulas”? Click the Listeners tab, and start crawling profiles for identifying information.

For some of us, this is reason enough to cease participation. In fact, several FC members have already begun brainstorming a non-commercial, decentralized alternative. Others propose ruining the data reported to Last.fm by deliberately spoofing the scrobbler software with falsified metadata.

But what about those FCers who use Last.fm, enjoy the services it provides, and accept its exchange of privacy for value? Do we demand they sacrifice this pleasure? To what end?

Rather than struggle against enjoyment of Last.fm, what if we were to maximize it? What would an enthusiastic embrace and exploration of a service like Last.fm reveal? Would we find its boundaries and be inspired to develop a successor with even greater capacity? Would it reveal new entrepreneurial opportunities that better protect user privacy without sacrificing the potential benefits of an enormous dataset?

Is this a positive, proactive, fanatic activism? Or surrender to an uncritical consumption?

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

Consider the case of YouTube, where thousands of people have been recently burned by spurious copyright claims. Every day YouTube users create and upload videos like the one above that incidentally infringe one or more copyrights. Quite often the videos - again, like the one above - are disabled because of a DMCA takedown notice. If the email we receive at YouTomb is any indication, these users rarely intended to flaunt the law or make a stand for free culture. Rather, they come to us confused at being disciplined for behaving in a way that felt ethically appropriate.

When large copyright holding organizations attempt to withdraw from popular web services, as Warner Music Group has done with both Last.fm and YouTube, they can no longer paint the users of those services as pirates, outsiders, or radicals as they once did with Napster and now do with the Pirate Bay. Instead, their withdrawal brands them perverse, confused, and out of step with widely accepted social practice.

What implications might this reversal have for the free culture activist?

Do we want those YouTube users to familiarize themselves with the arcane constraints of copyright law and the numerous variations we’ve made available? Or should the users be left alone and the regulatory institutions be compelled to struggle with a set of laws and expectations ill-suited to contemporary media ethics?

Imagine a free culture pro-activism that consistently supports, encourages, defends, and extends the everyday practices of users of services like Last.fm and YouTube. What might we gain through such radical participation?