Two days ago, Aaron Swartz was arrested on charges related to an on-going effort to download millions of academic articles from JSTOR. The story, as reported, goes something like this: Aaron joined the MIT network as a guest and started scraping articles using a custom script. Shortly, JSTOR detected the automated requests and tried to block Aaron’s laptop. He responded by spoofing his MAC address so that the network would assign his laptop a new IP address. This cat-and-mouse game escalated over the course of several months – including a period of time during which JSTOR may have blocked the entire MIT network – and ended up with Aaron sneaking into an off-limits computer closet to hide a laptop and external hard drive on the campus.

He now faces charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture. (Read the full indictment on the NYT blog.) Although JSTOR made peace with Swartz, the DOJ intends to proceed. The indictment alleges that Swartz intended to distribute the documents on “filesharing” networks but we haven’t seen any evidence to support this claim.

As student activists and advocates of the open access movement, what can we learn from these events? How will this affect the work we plan to do when we return to school next month? Can we find a balance between the impulse toward radical action and the steady grind of institutional change?

One thing is clear: Old analogies do not scale.

News coverage and online reaction to Swartz’s arrest reveal a painful failure to produce accurate, meaningful analogies for his massive duplication of academic articles.

James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University offered this frequently quoted comparison:

“It’s incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library.”

Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal is also widely quoted as saying that,

“[The arrest is] like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

On the Demand Progress blog, Morgan Callahan wrote:

“[Swartz] is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.”

And, perhaps most disappointing, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, described Swartz’s alleged crimes with a stubborn lack of nuance,

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

As internet-savvy free culture activists, we know that these comparisons fail to describe Swartz’s efforts and stymie real debate. PDFs on a web server are not at all like books on a library shelf. And, unlike a crowbar, Swartz’s script (cutely titled “keepgrabbing.py”) did no lasting damage to JSTOR’s machines. As long as these analogies persist, the urgent need for free culture will remain obscure.

Inaccurate descriptions of Swartz’s activities are representative of a growing misuse of the term “hacking” in news media. While Wikipedia editors struggle over the sprawling number of hacking-related pages, many journalists and commentators have fallen back on the 1990s, CompuServe-era habit of describing all computer-related crimes as
“hacking.” Everything from LulzSec to WikiLeaks to News of the World is now lumped awkwardly together. We must not allow open access or free culture to be added to that pile!

In an excellent blog post at Forbes, Timothly B. Lee describes Swartz’s actions as “reckless activism” and rightly warns about the potential negative effect on the reputation of our movement. He writes,

“Open access advocates have the natural high ground and are gradually winning the debate over the future of academic publishing.”

Open Access works without heroics. It is a reflection of the everyday practices of thousands of students, teachers, and researchers around the world.

We should condemn Swartz’s arrest because the charges are outrageous not because his tactics represent either free culture or the open access movement. The real attack on free culture is discursive, not legal. Bad analogies and out-dated comparisons obscure immediate needs that the Open Access movement seeks to address and the successes we continue to enjoy. We deserve better and we should demand it.

Update (July 25, 2010): Noam Cohen’s coverage in the NYT adds yet another unfortunate comparison to the list:

“A guy walks into a candy store and sees one of those “leave a penny, take a penny” trays. He picks it up, cups his hands and asks, “What can I get for 68 cents?”

That image came to mind with the case of Aaron Swartz …”

Is that a subtle reference to Rain Man?

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.

With our fourth conference just a week away, we are happy to announce another major milestone in the growth of Students for Free Culture. Brian Rowe, founder of the chapter at Seattle University School of Law, recently became the first SFC alumnus to join the Faculty Advisory Board!

Professor Rowe is a law and ethics professor at the intersection of human rights, code and copyright. He is an adjunct professor at University of Washington’s Information School and Seattle University Law. Brian has written comments to the Copyright Office on how DRM harms users with Disabilities and a mock trial used by high school students on blogger rights, fair use and copyright. Before joining academia he was a legal fellow at Public Knowledge and a legal intern at Creative Commons. His most recent works focus on issues of censorship through takedowns, fair Terms of Service and the implications of the Google Book Settlement on digital culture.

You can also keep track of him on twitter and identi.ca @sarterus.

Next time you see Brian, be sure to thank him for his on-going dedication to free culture and student activism!

The evidence for the Crimson’s claim is shaky, based largely on two sweeping claims about intellectual property. The Crimson states as common sense that without an effective intellectual property regime, there will be no incentive for innovation.

But around the world there are well documented examples of innovation and creativity that function in the absence of strong copyright protection: the world’s second largest movie industry, in Nigeria, and the booming “techno brega” scene in Brazil were both documented in the documentary “Good Copy Bad Copy,” which is available for free online. And that’s to say nothing of all of the innovations that took place before the mid-1700s, the works of Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and all the others that lived before modern copyright was developed. Lastly, enormous areas of creativity like fashion, cooking, comedy, and even magic tricks operate without copyright protection. Closer to home, the entire academic publishing system functions without authors retaining copyright for their works, instead exchanging their monopoly for the opportunity to publish. Copyright can certainly provide a motivation for entrepreneurs to create, but in light of these examples, The Crimson’s statement that the absence of IP laws would eliminate innovation seems unjustifiable.

The second overbroad claim in the editorial pertains to a concept called “moral rights.” “Intellectual property rights are important,” according to the Crimson, “because each person has a fundamental right to enjoy the fruits of his or her mental labor.” The fact is that that justification is not uncommon in parts of the world, but has no basis in American law. The Constitutional “copyright clause,” in fact, is the only right enumerated in the Constitution with an explicit purpose, and that purpose is incentivization: Congress may secure monopolies for creators in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” No less than Thomas Jefferson was uncomfortable with the “embarrassment” of monopolies, but conceded that as an incentive, they might be worthwhile. As a fundamental moral right? He never even considered it.

Finally, the editorial talks about the concept of “balance,” and then gets into a discussion of business models, debating whether the ones that exist today are convenient enough to remove the justification for piracy. This discussion is an interesting one, and has a place elsewhere, but let’s not confuse an economic argument with an ideological one. In the world’s premiere institution of higher learning—and truly, in any institution of higher learning—the balance isn’t a question of business models. Should Harvard University, at the urging of a media industry that presumes the students to be criminals, reduce the flow of information available to them?

The MPAA and similar organizations are comfortable to disregard the educational benefits that technology has brought us and to see the Harvard student body as a group of potential criminal freeloaders. One can sympathize with members of the movie industry which, in spite of consistently breaking annual box office records, purports to be having a hard time. And it’s certainly reasonable for a university to discuss what the legal and technical guidelines of its network ought to be. But it’s wrong to kowtow to the demands of a media industry at the cost of Harvard students’ technological autonomy.

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”

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.

For the purpose of clarity we first require a set of definitions and to understand there are 3 layers of copyright in this case. (1) The melody in GMTA is one work, subject to it’s own copyright; (2) the words “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear (celebrant name), happy birthday to you” is another work who’s author is, I argue, unknown despite the existence of two seemingly obvious candidates. Brauneis refers to the combination of these works as (3) GMTA/HBTY, which as a derivative work, is subject to its own copyright. To understand why Warner Music Group’s claim on Happy Birthday to You may be invalid, we have to trace back the history of the GMTA/HBTY combination; it’s where the $ is.

In 1893 Mildred and Patty began work on Song Stories for the Kindergarten, a songbook which providing children with expressive, emotional music of quality. The Hills adapted Mildred’s original melodies (such as GMTA) to fit the limited singing range of young children. Her drafts, equipped with easy and repetitive intervals, were brought into the classroom, tested, and then later modified as needed so that even the youngest kids could participate. Over the next years Mildred would focus on the study of African-American hymnals and spirituals while Patty advanced her studies in early childhood education.

Beginners' Book of Songs

Around or prior to 1912, birthday parties had come fully into vogue with the masses. Assisting in the celebrations, companies like Cable Company (Chicago) began producing unauthorized printings of sheet music – the melody of GMTA with the lyrics changed to HBTY. Its possible the Hills were unaware of these printings, but if they were we might assume from their lack of legal action that full recognition of HBTY’s massive market potential was still a few years off. On June 5th 1916 Mildred Hill passed away and her sister, Jessica Hill inherited a 1/5th interest in the renewal rights to Song Stories for the Kindergarten. In 1921 she filed a timely renewal on that claim with the copyright office.

Clearly the Hill family had a solid general understanding of copyright matters. Two examples will exemplify that fact. Patty Hill, according to first-hand accounts, attended a production of As Thousands Cheer produced by Sam H. Harris Theatrical Enterprises. During a birthday celebration scene, actors sung the lyrics of HBTY to the tune of GMTA, which (whether she was “enraged” or not) lead to accusations of copyright infringement by Jessica Hill who sued the theatrical group in the case of Hill v. Harris in August 1934. (view complaint)

Later that year (December 29th 1934) permission to use the GMTA melody was granted by Jessica Hill to the Clayton F. Summy Co., who began printing collections of sheet music containing the GTMA/HBTY combination. Clayton F. Summy then filed for copyright on 6 arrangements of the work, of which 4 were instrumental and 2 included GMTA/HBTY. The two arrangements with words were credited to Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman respectivly, as employees of the Clayton F. Summy Co. Orem’s claim was for “Arrangement as easy piano solo, with text.” Forman’s was on arrangement and “revised text” which consisted of this additional verse: “May your birthday be bright, full of cheer and delight.” A nice verse but, commercially insignificant today due to infrequency of use. (view original application)

In the interest of time, we’re going to fast forward now to 1958, after Summy F. Clayton Co. had been sold to the Sengstack family and was now run by David Sengstack, who merged with C.C. Birchard Company to create Summy-Birchard Co. This company published several collections which included GTMA/HBTY, and with much variation in accreditation. Hill-Wilson, Hill-Dahnert, “traditional”, and Patty (Patti) & Mildred Hill at one time or another all got props in the credit mix – a curious state of confusion when we consider that by the 1940s GMTA/HBTY was earning approx $15k-$20k per year in licensing fees.

Summy-Birchard's approved renewal

In 1962, licensing revenues were nearly $50k/year and in an effort to protect that cash flow, Summy-Birchard Co. filed for and successfully renewed their claim. Here we find problem one: the renewal mirrored exactly the 1934 registrations, with the exception of updating the Clayton F. Summy name to Summy-Birchard Co. The 1909 Copyright Act stated that the original term of copyright was obtained by publication via proper notice. Registration was not necessary during initial terms, but it was necessary for renewal. If the work sought to be renewed had not been previously registered, applicants could submit both an original registration & renewal at the same time, along with the deposit copies of the work being renewed. Summy-Birchard Co. never submitted an original registration for the GMTA/HBTY combination. No one has.

In other words, the 1962 renewal is valid regarding the Orem & Forman arrangements (piano solo, extra words) but not lay a specific claim on the GMTA/HBTY combination. Assume for the sake or argument that Summy-Birchard’s renewal was found to be valid – that the lack of original registration was simply a paperwork error or something we can blame on an intern. Summy-Birchard Co. would still need to prove its 1934 registration of GMTA/HBTY was valid to begin with.

Back in October 1942 the case of The Hill Foundation, Inc v. Clayton F. Summy Co. parties disuputed whether Jessica Hill has previously assigned copyright of Song Stories for the Kindergarten to Clayton F. Summy, or merely assigned it for limited-run printings. When we consider that in Hill v. Harris, the Hills were trying to assert and protect their copyright, I find it highly suspect they would have assigned rights away to Clayton F. Summy. During litigation, Clayton Summy Co. obtained a 1/8th interest in Song Stories for the Kindergarten through other legal, if not slightly sneaky means.

One William Hill had an interest in Song Stories for the Kindergarten through inheritance. He died in 1934, named his wife Corinne executrix of his estate, she died in 1939, and executrix to her estate, Leo B. Lowenthal then curiously petitioned the Probate Court of Cook County, Illinois to have himself withdraw from that representation & to have the court appoint one Allen Davy. This Davy fellow approved an inventory of the estate at the shockingly low figure of $15. He then persuaded the court to hold a private sale in which the inventory was sold to Clayton F. Summy for $25.00. Clayton F. Summy argued that it had an interest in GMTA/HBTY as a previously unpublished work from the estate. However no mention of, and in turn no transfer of unpublished works actually took place! Giving Clayon F. Summy the full benefit of the doubt here, let’s look at the issue of whether the Hill’s actually authored GMTA/HBTY to begin with.

Hill v. Harris testimony

Back in Hill v. Harris Patty delivered some testimony that causes serious doubt on the Hills’ claim of authorship and in turn, Clayton F. Summy’s claim of copyright interest. Patty stated (1) that she wrote words for the published version of GMTA (as asingle verse, which did not include HBTY lyrics), (2) that she, or she and Mildred, wrote “many other verses” to GMTA; and (3) that the HBTA words were “used” at school celebrations. She stops short of claiming she specifically “wrote” HBTY. So with Clayton F. Summy unable to prove an interest in renewal and the Hills unable to prove original authorship, the case of The Hill Foundation v. Clayton F. Summy was settled out of court and both parties shared licensing profits.

To recap: due to Summy-Birchard Co.’s failure to properly renew in 1962, GMTA/HBTY would have entered the public domain. If this failure were to be dismissed as an excusable accident, we are still absent any document which proves beyond doubt that Mildred and or Patty Hill, the most plausible authors of the GMTY/HBTA combination, actually wrote it. Absent that proof, WMG only has an interest in the additional copyright matter (piano solo and 2nd verse) registered to Orem & Forman in 1934. While valid, those are separate matters from the GMTA/HBTY combination. A rote, uncreative variation on the earlier work can not be registered as a derivative; there has to be some added originality or editorial insight. The GMTA/HBTY as we know it today appeared regularly in print prior to the 1930s. Neither Orem or Forman’s mostly forgotten additions had any impact on it’s market potential. I believe GMTA/HBTY or simply Happy Birthday to You is currently a public domain work. While this might be the end of the legal story, there’s still for me, a moral complication.

The Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) was first established in 1892 as the International Kindergarten Union. Co-founded by Patty Smith Hill, their primary efforts were to better the professional preparation of kindergarten teachers. Today the ACEI partners with organizations such as the United Nations and UNICEF to “promote and support…the optimal education and development of children…and to influence the professional growth of educators and the efforts of others who are committed to the needs of children in a changing society.” Seems like something I’d donate to; maybe even score a mug or tote bag in the deal.

Back when The Hill Foundation, Inc v. Clayton F. Summy settled out of court, an affidavit by Hill-trust trustee Alvin J. Burnett stated all rights in Good Morning to All & Happy Birthday to You were then assigned to the Clayton F. Summy Company in 1944 in return for a one-third share of future revenues. Years later in 1985, a lawyer for Summy-Birchard stated “performance proceeds from Happy Birthday to You bring two ‘low six-figure” checks each year to Summy-Birchard and the Hill Foundation.” Royalties rights were passed from the Hill Foundation to the ACEI who’s annual IRS Form 990′s state that for the years 2004, 2005, and 2006, royalty income was $584, 352; $631,866; & $738,510 respectively. $1,954,728.00 in 3 years is no small slice of pie for a non-profit, but its eligibility is called into question by the very case made against Warner Music Group.

A young Patty Hill

As an aside, I suggest reading Agnes Snyder’s 1972 paper for the ACEI, Dauntless Women in Childhood Education. In it, Snyder paints a picture of Patty Hill as a strong, dedicated intellectual who rose from a humble background to become one of the most important voices speaking on behalf of progressive early childhood education in America. After reading it, I became even more convinced the Hill sisters didn’t pen the GMTA/HBTY combination. In all aspects of their professional careers they were articulate and exact. While perhaps it’s not court-worthy evidence, it becomes hard to imagine GMTA/HBTY would have simply slipped through the cracks while their other works received protection through proper notice and registration. It seems more the case that the Hill’s felt entitled to rights due to HBTY’s similarity to GMTA; and as much as I’ve come to respect the Hills I’d stick to the argument that similarity isn’t enough to claim authorship.

I’ll close by humbly pointing out that I am an artist known for making typos, not a lawyer. I believe I’ve presented the general argument correctly but with speed, and suggest readers view both Braunies’ paper and beautiful collection of supporting documents.  If there is a counter-argument, let it be presented scholarly! One thing is for sure, the story of GMTA/HBTY is far from the standard folk-tale. It is a story where the push for participatory culture, pioneering women in education, early studies in African-American musicology, and copyright come together. It leaves us with a looming dilemma: Do we call for a full investigation of the copyright status of Happy Birthday to You with knowledge that its recognition as a public domain work would result in the loss of a major funding source for the ACEI; or does the public find the current arrangement agreeable, in which potentially illegally collected royalties are shared so that 1/3 goes to a respected non-profit and 2/3 goes to the Warner Music Group?

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song
Brauneis’ supporting documents
Association for Childhood Education International
Dauntless Women in Childhood Education Buy / PDF

Mark your calendars! The next Students for Free Culture conference will be held on February 19-20, 2011, in New York City! Start thinking about travel plans and funding now!

To get involved with planning the conference, join the conf11 listserv. (Need help subscribing? See the FAQ.)

The hashtag for the conference is #sfcnyc. Feel free to start tracking it and using it on twitter / identica.

Also, our current t-shirts are fantastic (see above), but we all kinda want to make some new ones, too. This is a call for t-shirt designs. Have a cool idea? Design away and send your idea to board-at-freeculture.org so we can look into getting them printed up!

Currently I feel we are working independently. I think this is not the best approach. Chapters should be collaborating with each other. Sharing ideas and planning activities together. Telling everyone else what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

This is very helpful for many reasons. First, for already established chapters, it’s a way to organize new activities. We can copy and remix what others have done. For new chapters, it is invaluable information. It shows them what we are doing, what they can do too. We have already prepared a chapter kick starter, Year One, but more information is always better.

I also believe this speeds up the planning of activities. For example, if I plan a FOSS Gaming Night for FC@UPRM, I need to prepare a flier to post in the bulletin boards around campus. But, if a chapter decides to host a gaming night as well, or something very similar, they shouldn’t need to make a whole new flier. They should be able to use the same flier/art a chapter already used. It’s only a matter of changing some text and, perhaps, a little bit of remixing. It’s the model we support and sponsor, a bottom-up way of making things. Like Newton once said “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

This is not a new idea. I know there are a couple fliers somewhere in the wiki, but I have no idea where they are, and that’s a problem. There should be a centralized place for all this, and something that is chapter friendly. The wiki can be a good place, but it’s currently more like a labyrinth. Perhaps a couple people from various chapters can join the webteam and do something together. I recently joined the webteam and I’m ready to work on this. Who’s with me?

• The creation of a new mailing list for chapters. Think of it like chapter news. We tell each other what we are doing. It might be short and sweet. Something like “We are talking about ACTA next Thursday.”  Or better yet, attached to the message is some art for the activity.
  • UPDATE: Well, this mailing list exists. I had no idea about it. I don’t know if I’m the only one that didn’t know about it, but, let use that. It already exists here.
• A centralized place for fliers. Something that’s organized and usable.
• Meeting in IRC. I miss the days when chapters would have meetings in IRC. These were planned meetings, not just “Hey Sparragus, what’s up? How’s FC@UPRM doing?” It would also be awesome if the board attended the meetings, too.
• Blogging more! We should be blogging more. In the SFC website, under chapter news, I always see a couple posts every other month. This is great. However, I would love to see more, and specially from more chapters. Blog once for every activity you have. And this is not necessarily blogging for SFC, but blogging for our members, our university, and for the world. We need to make sure the name of Students for Free Culture stands up high, and so does our chapters. Blogging is the easiest and quickest solution for this. Once again, it’s a great way to know what others are doing.

Let’s start conversing with each other! I would love to hear your thoughts on this. What should we do and how should we do it?

See ya all around!

Whether through ignorance or hubris, Facebook has angered many of its users over the last couple of years. No doubt readers of this blog are among them. In a wonderfully reflective blog post, Parker Higgins outlines six principles guiding his reluctant return to Facebook:

• Remember that Facebook is not your friend
• Keep on top of Facebook’s changes
• Manage all your data
• Diversify your services
• Fight for changes
• Support alternatives

Have you been thinking about ending or altering the terms of your relationship to Facebook? What would you add to his list? What challenges have you faced?

Don’t miss Parker’s full blog post here: Using Facebook responsibly.

It’s our pleasure to introduce the five members of the board:

• 
  Kevin Driscoll
  Kevin is the most senior member of the board, having served two prior terms. This month, he will finish his first year as a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in the University of Southern California.

• 
  Andrea Fassina
  Andrea is currently in his third year of study doing a Master in Electronics at the University of York in England. Andrea recently started a chapter at U of York, and is leading an effort to bring SFC to the UK.

• 
  Adi Kamdar
  Adi is a rising junior at Yale University, where he is pursuing a Science, Technology, and Society major. He initiated the Yale chapter of SFC, which has garnered national attention for several of its campaigns. He is an undergraduate fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and will be working at the Berkman Center this summer.

• 
  Parker Phinney
  Parker is a rising junior at Dartmouth, majoring in Computer Science. Parker has founded two SFC chapters (one at his high school and another at Dartmouth), and has led the freeculture.org web team. He interned at Creative Commons last summer and worked this past Winter with SFC alumni on OpenHatch.org.

• 
  Aditi Rajaram
  Aditi is a rising senior at NYU, double majoring in Journalism and Political Science. She has served as Secretary and Vice President of Free Culture @ NYU, and will be serving as President next year.

Special advisors
2009-2010 board members Kevin Donovan and Ben Moskowitz will stay with SFC leadership as special advisors to the board of directors.

Next steps
Please keep an eye out, or join our discussion list, as we share the next steps for SFC and its expansion in the 2010-2011 school year! If you are interested in starting a chapter, or supporting the organization, please be in touch with board@freeculture.org.

Pat Aufderheide, University Professor @ American University; Director, Center for Social Media

Professor Aufderheide examines the effects of the law on artists and the public interest. She is the author of Communications Policy in the Public Interest and Documentary: A Very Short Introduction. In recent years, she has promoted fair use through a series of important best practice guides for various industries. She is closely tied to the artistic community through past and present positions with Kartemquin Films, Sundance Film Festival, and Independent Television Service. Her tweets are here.

Wendy Seltzer, Fellow, Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship; Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Wendy Seltzer has played an influential role in promoting freedom in the digital world for more than a decade. She has taught courses on the intersection of technology, commerce, and law at American University, Oxford, Brooklyn Law School and Northeastern. As the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse she brought attention to the unfounded legal threats dampening free speech online. She serves on the board of the Tor Project to support privacy online and on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation to advance the web for human empowerment. Her prolific activities are chronicled on her Twitter account here.

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law @ Duke Law School; Co-founder, Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Professor Boyle is a teacher and writer studying the rising conflict between the intellectual ecology of the public domain and the movement that seeks to enclose it through private means. His books include The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind and Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society. Additionally, he co-founded both Science Commons and ccLearn to bring the work of Creative Commons to the specific domains of science and education. He is a frequent commentator in the media, notably through his regular FT column. The blog for his most recent book is here.

Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts @ the University of Southern California;

Professor Jenkins moved to USC in 2009 after a decade as the Director of MIT’s influential Comparative Media Studies program. He has written or edited twelve books that examine media, culture and the interplay between creators and consumers, such as Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He is a highly-respected researcher, receiving grants from the MacArthur Foundation and testifying before the American government. His blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, is available here.

[Aufderheide photo licensed CC BY by (fittingly) Wendy Seltzer; Seltzer photo licensed CC BY-NC-SA by foxgrrl; Jenkins photo licensed CC BY by deneyterrio.]

In the hopes of taking this to the next level, today, we are announcing the first members of our new SFC Faculty Advisory Board. We have reached out to a number of intellectual leaders who will provide guidance and vision for Students for Free Culture through semiannual conversations with the organization. Over the next couple weeks, we will be announcing the members of this group.

In this week’s group, we are joined by some fantastic folks, so without further ado, here are the first four members:

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law @ Harvard Law School; Director, Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics

Professor Lessig has, for more than a decade, been one of the leading thinkers on the intersection of technology and law, especially copyright. He co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of Remix (2008), Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004),The Future of Ideas(2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). In recent years, he has shifted his focus to “institutional corruption” in American public life. You can follow his Twitter here.

Michael R. Nelson, Visiting Professor @ Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program

Professor Nelson teaches courses on innovation and Internet policy. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, he was the Director of Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM. Prior to joining IBM in 1998, Professor Nelson was Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission, a Special Assistant for IT at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a staff member of the Senate Subcommittee of Science, Technology and Space. Until recently, he served as the Internet Society’s Vice President for Public Policy and recently became Chairman-Elect of the Technology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Trustee of the Institute for International Communications. You can follow his Twitter here.

Edward Felten, Professor of Computer Science & Public Affairs @ Princeton University; Director, Center for Information Technology Policy

Professor Felten teaches courses at the intersection of computer science and public policy. In addition to publishing widely in fields from encryption to government transparency, he started the popular Freedom to Tinker blog. Professor Felten served as a government witness in United States v. Microsoft and later work revealed that the Sony Rootkit patch made user’s computers more vulnerable to attack. His research, such as into the failures of electronic voting machines or digital rights management, is notable for its real-world applicability.

Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication @ NYU

Professor Coleman is an anthropologist who studies the ethics of digital collaboration and the role that media and law have in sustaining political activism. She has conducted ethnographic research on hackers in the Debian community and has a forthcoming book entitled “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software.” Her new research will focus on peer-to-peer patient activism online.

[Felten photo licensed CC-BY by Joseph Lorenzo Hall | Lessig photo licensed CC-BY via Wikimedia]

Details:
Sunday, May 9th at 9 PM EST (GMT -5)
irc.freenode.net
#freeculture

For help with IRC, visit http://wiki.freeculture.org/IRC

To see the nominees for the 2010-2011 board of directors, visit http://wiki.freeculture.org/Board10/Nominations

Our friends at Public Knowledge write to let us know that they have a new job opening that would be a great opportunity for a recently graduated student excited about promoting free culture.

“The Web Content and New Media Associate will work with Public Knowledge (PK) outreach and legal staff to ensure that PK’s website is regularly updated, relevant, timely and widely dispersed through the use of social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube). Public Knowledge is a growing, internationally prominent consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. that works to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.”

The job is an opportunity to promote free culture through “translating” legal issues into layperson’s terms, generating content for the general public, and assisting in the planning of public events and initiatives (such as their successful World’s Fair Use Day). PK is looking for a college graduate with a passion for technology, public policy, media reform and activism. Candidates should have strong communications skills, be a quick learner and able to produce high-quality results on tight deadlines. Basic web design (HTML/CSS), graphic design, video production, social media, Drupal, and web activism experience is a plus. Compensation is competitive with excellent benefits and opportunities for professional growth.

It’s a great time to be in D.C. so interested candidates should provide a cover letter, resume, and writing sample of less than 1,000 words to Mehan Jayasuriya (mehan [at] publicknowledge [dot] org).

The flyer is available here.

Head over to the Nominations page to nominate someone you think will help advance the organization in 2010-2011. Candidates must accept nomination and offer biographical details no later than April 30.

Between April 30 and May 10, candidates will answer questions from the community and participate in one live Q/A session.

Chapters will receive e-vote tokens by email on Monday, May 10th, and must cast their votes by Friday, May 14. The results will be announced on Monday, May 17th.

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 April 25, 2010.

On campaigning, etc.

Nominees will have until April 25th 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 April 25th, 2009.

1. The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is the Executive Branch’s agency tasked with addressing telecommunications and information policy. Their work has been highlighted in recent months through the Broadband Grants program and the recent speech by Larry Strickling calling for Internet Policy 3.0. They are seeking interns for both the summer and during the school year and if you are interested, get in touch with Christopher Hemmerlein who coordinates their program [chemmerlein (at) ntia (d0t) doc (dot) gov]. Please note that they can only consider American citizens.
2. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the UN agency that focused on the global IP regime. In recent years, they have been at the center for discussions over copyright exceptions and limitations and the Treaty for the Blind. The new division of economic research at WIPO is offering a couple internships to PhD or otherwise qualified students who are interested in spending 3-6 months in Geneva. Completed applications can be submitted to staff (dot) engagements (at) wipo (dot) int [cc: sasch (dot) wunsch-vincent (at) wipo (dot) int].

These should be great opportunities to learn about the policy work of issues SFC cares about. If you have any other internships ideas, be sure to get in touch.

“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?

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]

And for all the benefits of Gmail, there are some very real concerns. As students, we need to know that Yale has signed a contract with Google guaranteeing certain provisions. Right now, the transition to Gmail depends on Google’s generosity to provide this service without cost or advertisements. If Google decides to charge in the future, what are the ramifications for Yale? We have not heard how much control, if any, ITS and the University will have over backups, data security and migration. We don’t know where the Gmail servers will be located and what privacy protections legally apply in that jurisdiction. At Brown, for instance, mail can be stored in “datacenters outside the borders of the United States” according to the university’s Web site. In addition, no one has told us how much access Google and its data mining algorithms will have to Yale e-mail. Even if Google and ITS do have all the answers, we are entitled to at least ask the questions.

To listen to the BBC piece on the topic, check out their site within the next week or Adi’s blog.

Use this as an opportunity to convene a discussion, or start a workshop, or get your group off the ground!

Lessig’s talk will explore copyright in a digital age, and the importance of a doctrine like fair use. Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage creative expression and political participation, not just passive consumption.

If you want to host your own screening, fill out the form at http://openvideoalliance.org/event/lessig-registration/. Small grants are available to pay facilities fees, refreshments, or materials. If you have questions or comments, or if you’d like to get more information about hosting your own event, you can contact the event organizers at conference@openvideoalliance.org.

Give a dollar, $25, $100—it’s up to you. 100% of the proceeds will fund future Students for Free Culture projects. To sweeten the deal for you, we’re announcing some cool gifts:

•If you register at $50 or more, get a DVD with the complete Free Culture 2008 videos archive

•If you register at $75 or more, get a signed copy of one of these books:

• Remix by Lawrence Lessig OR
• Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

•If you register at $100 or more, get one of these badges of coolness:

• a yourname@freeculture.org email address OR
• a custom answering machine greeting by none other than cyberscholar Jonathan Zittrain

Just register by February 9th at your chosen level and we’ll contact you to get your gift preferences. Gifts are cumulative, so if you register at $100 or more you get a DVD, a signed book, and a badge of coolness. Gifts apply to all previous registrations, too.

Questions? Email board@freeculture.org.

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.

World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials.

The event has a great line-up of artists, policymakers, and pundits including:

• Representative Mike Doyle (PA 14th)
• Dan Walsh of ‘Garfield minus Garfield’
• Marc Hosler of Negativland
• DJ Earworm
• Mike Masnick of Techdirt
• Brett Gaylor of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’
• Nina Paley of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’
• Chris Burke, a machinima artist
• Eliza Kreisinger, a mash-up artist
• Jonathan McIntosh, a mash-up artist

If you can’t make it to the free event, it will be webcast; it looks great, so we encourage you to check it out!

In the meantime, students interested in attending should investigate travel funding from their universities. The SFC Board is working hard to secure donations, but we need your help. Most schools provide money to registered student groups and many departments have discretionary funds to support educational opportunities for students. Look around and apply early because these things can take time; and don’t hesitate to contact the Board if we can provide any documentation to help!

Secondly, to make this a success, we’ll need volunteers to help with both pre-conference and during the event. We have set-up a mailing list to coordinate planning and encourage you to sign up for it here.

Finally, we would like to hear ideas for the second day’s workshops. If you have ideas, send them out to the FC X mailing list or add them to the call for workshop proposals and we’ll collect them.

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

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.

If you’re a student leader, now is the time to seek travel funding from your schools and departments. You’d be surprised to learn how much support is available for you to represent your school at an international conference. Consult with your professors, counselors, and department heads to find out about grant opportunities.

We will be working hard to secure travel funding for representatives from SFC chapters to attend the conference. But we can’t guarantee funding, so ask around! Contact us if you need an invitation letter or any other support.

If you’re interested in volunteering, we now have a collaborative mailing list. We’ll use the list in the day-to-day coordination of the conference, up to and after the event. Sign up here.

Stay tuned for more updates. To stay in touch, consider following us on Twitter/identi.ca or subscribing to our RSS feed.

Surveys

In the coming weeks, we hope to contact a number of universities to solicit their responses to the surveys that have been created to gather data about university openness. Today, the surveys for open access publishing and open educational resources are largely completed. I encourage you to check out the previous links and add your thoughts, either on the wiki or by emailing board-at-freeculture-dot-org. Even more, feel free to add to the other surveys which need elaboration.

We also need to identify the administrators at each university who should receive the surveys. If you attend a school that you believe should be surveyed, please add administrators names to the wiki or contact board-at-freeculture-dot-org. Recipients should include librarians, learning technologists, academic coordinators (such as provosts) and potentially faculty leadership.

Branding

Secondly, after speaking with a number of people, we believe that it would be best to slightly re-brand the campaign. As you know, up until now, this effort has been known as the Open University Campaign. However, the term ‘open university’ has proven to be slightly problematic due to its reference to an older concept of distance-learning. Not only is this a trademarked term, it has proven to be confusing to a number of people – something we definitely don’t want. Obviously, it’s not ideal to change and lose any reputation (and googlejuice) that the name has, but to avoid having this problem even later in the game, we think the name Open Education Campaign would be for the best (especially because it doesn’t limit the work strictly to universities). Anyone with thoughts (or interest in doing design for this brand), should definitely get in touch.

We’re excited about this project and hope you’ll join us.

In October 2008, hundreds of students, activists, coders and scholars gathered at UC Berkeley for Free Culture 2008. Between illuminating panel discussions and productive unconference sessions, the free culture community networked and planned for the future. It was there that the Wheeler Declaration was conceived to form the basis for SFC’s current advocacy around opening higher education.

Now, a little more than a year later, Students for Free Culture will be convening the international free culture community for two days of networking, learning and acting. Free Culture X, the 2010 conference of SFC, will take place on February 13th and 14th at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The vision is to bring together student activists and free culture luminaries to discuss, among other topics, free software and open standards, open access scholarship, open educational resources, network neutrality, and university patent policy, especially in the context of higher education.

In the coming weeks, we will announce the schedule and other logistics, but in the meantime, the Board of SFC wants to hear from you. If you have ideas, suggestions or would like to be involved, be in touch (board-at-freeculture-dot-org).

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.]

For only $20 (+S&H), you get a really high-quality shirt designed by Patrick Moberg and made by American Apparel. Mine (the colorful copyleft one) has been a great conversation starter for people who otherwise would not be at all familiar with the work we do with Students for Free Culture.

So, help promote free culture by purchasing one of the Students for Free Culture shirts!

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!

The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette, a copy of Final Cut Studio, and an iPod Nano. The Runner Up and People’s Choice Award winners will each receive $500 cool ones.

Check out some previous years’ winners:

GrowUp from SPARC on Vimeo.

Brighter from SPARC on Vimeo.

Entries in the international Sparky Awards competition must be received before December 6, 2009. To be eligible, videos must be freely available on the Internet and available for use under a Creative Commons License.

The 2009 Sparky Awards are sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Campus MovieFest, Penn Libraries, Students for Free Culture, and the Student PIRGs, and organized by SPARC. For details on the contest and tips on organizing a local competition, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org . For details on the contest and tips on organizing a local competition, visit the Sparky Awards Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org .

Says Gabi Fitz,

The contest is really unique in that it is focused so squarely on connecting students and working artists with the valuable research that nonprofits do… while spotlighting the critical importance of open licensing in the process of remixing for social change.

So, check out the contest website and give your creative side a whirl by Dec 31st.

In this guest post, Ryan Radia, an information policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that the privacy concerns raised by the settlement are not convincing.

Wonder why practically every student today uses Gmail, YouTube, or some other Google service? Chances are it’s because they’re free. Designing and running these services, however, is not.

So how does Google make enough money to fund its services when it doesn’t charge the vast majority of its users? Simple: Advertising, which accounts for 99% of Google’s revenue.

Online ads can be annoying – we’ve all encountered obtrusive pop-ups – but they play a crucial role in online commerce. In 2008, advertisers spent over $23 billion on Web ads. It’s no secret why so many firms buy ads – done properly, advertising can build brand reputation, spur sales, and inform potential customers. But perhaps the best part about advertising is that it sustains free Web services.

Google Book Search is no exception. While Google would sell digital books under the proposed settlement it’s reached with authors and publishers, advertising would still likely generate a large share of revenue for Google Books.

This is great news for authors and readers alike. Authors would earn the majority of ad revenues (63%, according to the latest version of the settlement). Users would also benefit, because the Google Book deal would allow anybody in the U.S. to freely search and browse tens of millions of currently unavailable books.

Yet not everyone is happy about the deal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, and others have called for strict limits on the data Google may collect from Book Search users. The groups argue that storing detailed information about what books individuals read and purchase would violate readers’ privacy.

These groups forget that data collection and strong privacy protections can and do coexist. Amazon’s Kindle, a portable reading device that has sold millions of digital books, stores extensive data on its users. ACLU and EFF haven’t identified a single actual harm that’s resulted from a breach involving Kindle, or any other digital book service for that matter.

Google’s business depends on user trust, so it has a huge incentive to keep user data as safe as possible.

Google’s critics should turn their attention to the real privacy threat: Government. To date, courts have refused to apply Fourth Amendment protections to data stored with “cloud” services like Google’s. Thus, a mere subpoena – civil or criminal – is all it takes to force Google to disclose user information to the feds.

ACLU and EFF argue that limiting Google’s data collection reduces the chances that courts will get a hold of personal data. Fair enough. But limiting data collection has serious downsides. Without individualized data, advertisers cannot target ads, meaning users are far more likely to see “dumb” ads. Because users don’t click on these ads as often, advertisers earn less revenue, and authors earn less money. Worse, dumb ads undercut Google’s revenue, reducing its incentive to invest in scanning orphan works.

Limiting government’s power to obtain personal data is a far better solution to privacy concerns than saddling Google with onerous data collection limits.

For its part, Google could help further privacy without endangering advertising by disclosing how many “enforceable requests” for user data it receives, and explaining how it decides whether to challenge court orders that demand user information.

Moreover, concerned users can always adopt privacy-enhancing technologies that protect anonymity and limit data collection on an individualized basis. And traditional libraries, which offer strong privacy protections, aren’t going anywhere.

But let’s not forget that the real privacy violator is the government, not Google.

– Ryan Radia

Previous Posts in This Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL
• Ed Van Gemert of UW-Wisconsin
• Jason Schultz of UC Berkeley

Below, I’ve offered some of my reflections on the film along with questions it raised for me. I hope this can be a useful guide to get conversations started in your chapters. Definitely leave a comment and let me know what came up for you!

Caution: spoilers ahead.

“Listen, kids. We need to simplify…”

After accidentally erasing all of the store’s cassettes, the friends start taking requests and producing bespoke versions of their customers’ favorite movies. Challenged to recreate everything from Ghostbusters to Boyz N Da Hood to Driving Miss Daisy, they cast their neighbors in supporting roles and craft fantastical costumes and special effects from materials found in a nearby junkyard. Business picks up quickly for the fictional filmmakers and soon they’ve drawn the attention of everyone from awetruck film buffs to stuffy MPAA representatives (portrayed in brutal parody.)

“Stockholders in their own happiness.”

Be Kind depicts one image of free culture in action. It raises many of the same questions that challenge real creators working outside of the conventional media industries. Who owns popular culture? What makes a film “good”? Where are the boundaries among inspiration, adaptation, tribute, and infringement?

“Taste has nothing to do with it.”

Outside the content of the film itself, the circumstances of its production, release, marketing, and distribution raise many issues of interest to free culture activists. First and foremost, Be Kind Rewind was produced by New Line Cinema which has been owned since 1996 by closed culture zealots, Time Warner. How do we read a film that seems to encourage remix culture when it is structurally supported by the same corporation that effected the YouTube massacre of January 2009?

Bootlegging device

When Be Kind was screen at MIT, the invitation included the following instructions:

This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. By attending, you agree not to bring any audio or video recording device into the theater and consent to a physical search of your belongings and person. A video cell phone is classified as a recording device and cannot be taken into the screening. Any attempted use of recording devices will result in immediate removal from the theater, forfeiture of the device, and may subject you to criminal and civil liability. Please allow additional time for heightened security.You can assist us by leaving all non-essential bags and cell phones at home or in your vehicle.

In response, MIT Free Culture brought a large pinhole camera to point at the screen (which drew a laugh from Gondry) and handed out ironic stickers to attendees with slogans like, “I am a recording device” and “I will recount this movie to my friends.” After the screening, Ana Domb wrote more about the contradictions in a “a movie about the fringe [...] that has chosen to play by the conventional rules.” Is it possible to play both sides?

“Maybe I am in Ghostbusters!”

In addition to its curious position relative to the film industry, Be Kind points to the inextricable relationship between free and pop culture. The characters’ familiarity and appreciation for Hollywood cinema is central to the development of their unusual films. When one character proclaims, “Maybe I am in Ghostbusters!” He calls into question the authority of a movie that is as much a beloved popular myth as it is an industrial commodity. How far outside of Ghostbusters is any fan? When someone maintains a Ghostbusters fan page on which he explain the physics of ectoplasm, isn’t there a measure by which he is more “in” Ghostbusters than actor Bill Murray, who merely played Dr. Peter Venkman for a paycheck back in ’84?

“We were supposed to remake Back to the Future instead of Ghostbusters.”

Both the characters in the fiction and the filmmakers themselves faced questions of copyright infringement in their productions. According to a promotional interview with Melonie Diaz, Gondry had to get permission for each movie that is remade within Be Kind Rewind and that Back to the Future had to be written out of the script because of legal constraints. In real fan production, the law rarely intervenes until after release.

Back to the Future (Sweded)

As Gondry hoped, Be Kind Rewind inspired numerous fans to create their own low-budget remakes of big-budget films. Jurassic Park, The Neverending Story, and – yes, even Back to the Future, got the Be Kind treatment.

Shot-by-shot remake of Journey’s “Separate Ways” music video with original inset

Of course, fan remakes long precede Be Kind Rewind. Lovingly crafted shot-by-shot productions abound on the web in parody and tribute to an enormous variety of music videos, TV shows, and films.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Perhaps the most well-known shot-by-shot remake is Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Adaptaion. Undertaken by three friends after seeing the film’s 1982 theatrical release, they used a bootleg audio cassette recording and as much reference material as they could gather from storybooks and magazines to construct their finely detailed recreation. The trio worked on the Adaptation for their entire adolesence, finally completing the remake seven years after they began. Despite the project’s considerable press attention, the legal tangle of copyright has restrained its widespread distribution and it is seldom screened.

Nollywood Babylon

Be Kind Rewind encourages viewers to reflect on our assumptions about Hollywood, authorship, ownership, and the creative possibilities in an age of accessible media technology. What other film industry paradigms might be possible? Nigeria’s “Nollywood” scene, a favorite documentary subject since its inclusion in 2007′s Good Copy, Bad Copy, reveals radically different models for financing, producing, distributing, and viewering films. If the Hollywood system is really falling apart, as we are lead to believe, how might the North American system be similarly re-imagined?

Gondry remakes his own trailer

How might Be Kind Rewind have proceeded differently? Are you satisfied by its conclusion? Could a culture of “sweded” remakes co-exist alongside conventional Hollywood cinema? Which Ghostbusters do you prefer?

Who’s going to be the first remix or remake Be Kind Rewind itself?

“Seed”, Manky Maxblack, BY-ND

Year One is a project to help new (and re-new-ing) chapters survive their first two semesters. It is loosely structured around a series of meetings and movie nights that will make connections among chapters and bring new members up to speed on the thornier issues of free culture past and present.

Year One is aimed at new chapters but is open to all who would like to participate. To get involved, drop me an email: kevin /at/ freeculture.org.

Here is a partial list of chapters being (re-)organized this semester:

• University of Alabama, Birmingham
• Case Western University
• University of Illinois/Urbana Champaign
• European University Institute, Florence
• Middle Tennessee State University
• University of Southern California
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Yale

For more information on the project, take a look at the (always in progress) Year One wiki page.

In this guest post, Jason Schultz, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, examines the academic implications of poor privacy.

I’ve never seen my students more depressed than the moment they walk about of the campus bookstore. Instead of inspiration and glee, they often look like Quasimoto, the famous hunchback — dragging their bags full of thick clunky tomes behind them and bemoaning the huge hit they just took in their wallets. This is especially true today, as monumental budget cuts have driven up tuition at state universities like UC Berkeley to unprecedented heights. The cost of a college education has never been more daunting or its debt more long-lasting.

Enter Google Book Search (GBS), the half-decade-old scanning project by the popular search company in Mountain View. With GBS, the promise of affordable modern access to textbooks is at your fingertips. For example, if an academic publisher is part of Google’s Publisher Program, a large or small portion of the book may already be available depending on the publisher’s permissions. However, for other books that are still under copyright, Google will only display snippets — small 8-12 line “samples” of text that highlight what the viewer is searching for. Still, if you find a snippet that sounds good, you can often order the book via library or bookstore through a link on the side of the page.

Despite the limited size of these snippets, Google has been involved in a copyright lawsuit over its Book Search project that has now come to a head with a gigantic and important Settlement Agreement. The original lawsuit mostly concerned Google’s scanning, indexing, and snippet displays and whether or not those were copyright infringements or “fair use” of the books. The Settlement, however, covers many, many issues — open access, disability and civil rights, competition issues, metadata accuracy, and fair use just to name a few — too many to describe in a single blog post. However, I do want to highlight one of the key issues — privacy. You can check out other issues here.

When it comes to book privacy, it is important to think about it in the context of what many academics and activists call The Chilling Effect. Think about it. If you go to a library or a book store most days, you can walk around and browse fairly anonymously. If you decide you want to take a sneak peak at the somewhat embarrassing new Twilight novel, most people will never know. Or say you have a more serious concern, such as HIV or domestic violence. The privacy in physical libraries allows you to explore and understand important issues, either personally or for research and educational purposes. This privacy even extends to what you buy or check out — almost all libraries and bookstores protect these records from access by third parties as vehemently as possible. (For example, the American Library Association Code of Ethics specifically commits every librarian to protecting patron privacy.).

So the question for Google, and for the Settlement, is what kind of privacy protections will GBS offer? Well, the Settlement Agreement doesn’t say. It’s entirely silent on the issue of reader privacy. To their credit, Google has taken this concern quite seriously outside the Settlement, even going so far as to post a proposed Privacy Policy and make several comments on their blog. Yet concerns remain. For instance, despite Google’s assurances that they “take our privacy commitments to our users very seriously[,]” there are open questions about how much information they will collect on readers who use GBS, whether that information will be used in conjunction with other Google Services (such as its advertising services), how long they will keep the information, and under what circumstances they will disclose it to third parties, such as the government or those involved in civil lawsuits. These concerns are very real, as we have seen examples of subpoenas for book information in the past here, here, and here.

Moreover, there is also a concern about Google changing its mind in the future. If the settlement is approved (the Judge in the case will hold a hearing on October 7, 2009 to consider the matter), there is nothing that prevents Google from deciding at some future date to offer less privacy to readers. Locking Google into privacy as part of the Settlement ensures that readers are protected now and in the future. (I should note that I helped file a brief asking the Judge to do just that on behalf on a group of authors and publishers who share this concern.)

In sum, GBS is an amazing new opportunity to access information from books. There is no doubt about that. And the Settlement provides unprecedented additional opportunities for students to read. However, it is important to keep in mind the trade-offs that GBS and the Settlement offer and to make sure that the balance is positive before we whole-heartedly endorse this dramatic change in the future of the way we read, learn, and share information. For every student reading this, it is your future that is at stake, so pay attention. This is one test that may well be part of your permanent record for years to come.

– Jason Schultz

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL
• Ed Van Gemert of UW-Wisconsin

In this guest post, Ed Van Gemert, Deputy Director of the General Library System at UW-Madison, explains why students want to use Google Book Search.

At UW-Madison, we routinely refer students to Google Books and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collection. Several examples illustrate some of the K-12 and college use and wide adoption of electronic scholarly resources. Annual usage grows exponentially.

• “I am a college student working on a cultural tapestry for one of my courses.  My instructor wants us to save photographs of the culture we’ve chosen to study on a jpeg file and it can’t be copyrighted. I was hoping you would give me permission to use some of these pictures for my project.  She wants an e-mail sent with consent to use them.  I can’t find pictures any place that aren’t copyrighted, and have been unable to gain permission from any site.  This is strictly for my final; educational use only.  Please help!”
  – University of Wisconsin Digital Collection:  Africa Focus

“I am an eighth-grade student.  I am writing to request information for a school project.  My social studies and English classes are involved in a large research project called “History Day.”   Each year this project follows a different them that is set by the National History Day Office, and for this school year our theme is Conflict and Compromise in History.  I am investigating the 1933 Wisconsin milk strikes.  For this assignment, we are required to study the person/idea/event/issue itself, the background and context in which it happened, and the impact/influence/change it brought about.  I am writing to ask for any articles or documents you could send me with information about the three milk strikes that occurred because of the strikes, and the effectiveness of the strikes.”
University of Wisconsin Digital Collection: State of Wisconsin Collection

The State of Wisconsin collection probably has the greatest impact on K-12 students.  It contains thousands of images and hundreds of books documenting Wisconsin state history which is valuable for teaching and learning.  In this instance we were able to direct the student to primary source interviews, articles, and music of and about the milk strikes.  Many of the resources in the UW digital collection are open access.

National History Day had multiple K-12 students focusing on Harry Houdini.  Copies of his works were checked out from the library.  Campus librarians referred groups to Google Books because four books and a number of articles by Harry Houdini are available full text.  Books available include:

• Miracle Mongers and Their Methods:  a Complete Expose of the Modus Operandi,
• The Unmasking of Robert Houdini,
• Houdini’s Paper Magic:  The Whole Art of Performing with paper.

Native American History classes at UW-Madison as well as National History Day K-12 students have exhausted the available print copies of Chief Black Hawk’s autobiography.  It is available at Google Books as well as other early materials on Black Hawk. Native American History classes have been referred to Google Books to access the Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners 1820-1940.  Google Books offers a good alternative.

An undergraduate researching the Titanic needed primary source materials.  Campus print copies of the congressional hearings into the Titanic were checked out.  The U.S. Congress Hearing on the sinking of the Titanic as well as the British inquiry into the loss of the Titanic was available full text on Google Books.

Undergraduates in environmental history classes have been referred to Google Books to access full text of 19th Century County/Local Histories.

Just some of the many examples of why students find value in using the digital scholarly resources now available in Google Books and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.

– Ed Van Gemert

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS
• Brandon Butler of ARL

In this guest post, Brandon C. Butler, Law and Policy Fellow at the Association of Research Libraries, addresses the settlement in the context of institutional equality and intellectual freedom.

First, we would like to thank Students for Free Culture for inviting us to share our thoughts on this important issue. The Association of Research Libraries has followed the Google Books litigation closely, and filed Comments with the court along with our partners the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries. These three associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the United States and Canada. These associations also cooperate in the Library Copyright Alliance to address other copyright issues that affect libraries and their patrons.

Google and the authors and publishers who sued the search giant over its book-scanning activities have proposed a settlement agreement that would end the suit and govern Google’s scanning going forward. In essence, the settlement would allow Google to continue scanning, and even to offer new products based on the body of digitized books it creates, so long as it shares revenue from these services with rights-holders. More information from the Library Copyright Alliance about the Settlement is available here.

While the parties to this dispute have agreed to the settlement, the judge presiding over the case still has to approve its terms. Copyright owners and other interested parties have filed hundreds of comments with the court. Members of the LCA filed Comments in support of the settlement, but we also raised some serious concerns that we felt the court should address by careful oversight. Students for Free Culture asked us to explain two concerns we raised in our Comments: increasing inequalities between universities and limits to intellectual freedom.

Widespread access to a Google institutional subscription plan with millions of digital books would help level the playing field between elite research universities and less privileged institutions around the country. If the price of the subscription is too high, however, it will have exactly the opposite effect: Students and faculty will demand access to the Google service, but only the wealthiest institutions will be able to afford it. Paying a high price for the Google subscription would divert significant funding away from other important university priorities, creating new inequalities even among universities that have the service. Some schools could be forced to sacrifice heavily to keep up with the wealthiest institutions.

What are the chances that the settlement will have this effect? It is hard to say. If its price is modeled on increasingly exorbitant academic journal subscription prices, the Google service will be out of reach for most institutions. The authors and publishers of most books in the Google corpus are most likely academics who prize access over profits, but if the interest of rights-holders is represented solely (or mostly) by commercial writers and publishers, the price could be set too high.

Intellectual freedom is at stake in the settlement in several ways. First, concerns about user privacy could have a chilling effect on research use of the Google product. Second, the settlement only requires Google to provide access to 85% of the in-copyright, out-of-print works it has scanned. This gives Google discretion to exclude over 1 million books. Google itself may not want to “be evil,” but it will surely encounter pressure from angry partisans seeking exclusion of disfavored books. The Book Search product will give everyone, including children, access to up to 20% of any book from anywhere, and 100% of any book from free public access terminals in public libraries. How long before an angry parent demands that Google ban racy or politically edgy works? The First Amendment does not require private companies like Google to forego censorship, and there will surely be pressure on Google to choose economic expedience over political principle.

Unlike other critics who have voiced similar concerns, we do not oppose the Settlement overall. We believe its likely benefits substantially outweigh its possible harms. The parties and the court can ensure this net gain by awareness of these possible harms and reasonable vigilance against them. Thank you again for this chance to share our views.

– Brandon C. Butler

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF
• James Grimmelmann of NYLS

In this guest post, James Grimmelmann of New York Law School discusses the effects on orphan works. Interested readers should also check out the upcoming D is for Digitize Conference being hosted by NYLS.

The most important, and perhaps least appreciated, part of the Google Book Search settlement is its effects on “orphan works.”  There are hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of books that are in copyright but whose owners can’t be found. Anyone who wants to reprint them faces a catch-22.   Since the owner is unknown, there’s no way to get permission.  But if the new publisher just goes ahead without permission, it faces liability of up to $150,000.  No one wants to take that risk, so the orphan stays out of print.

The result is that orphan works languish in obscurity, hard to find and hard to consult.  If you’re not at a rich university with a huge library, you’ll have a tough time getting your hands on them. The orphan works problem is the Bermuda Triangle of the copyright system, where these forgotten books are lost to culture.

The Google Book Search settlement’s most exciting, and most dangerous, effect is on these orphan works.  Under the settlement, Google gets a license to sell copies of out-of-print books unless the copyright owners object.  For orphans, by definition, the owners are highly unlikely to show up and object.  The result is that most orphan works become will available again, both for individual purchase and as a bulk subscription to universities and libraries.

The downside, from a free culture point of view, is that only Google will be able to provide access to the orphans.  Instead of individual authors deciding on what terms to make their books available, that power is concentrated in Google’s hands.  If the database becomes a “must-have” item for research libraries, schools will compete against each other to have it, driving up the price until, once again, only the richest univerities have access.  (This might still be an improvement over the status quo, which privileges students who attend schools whose libraries have physical copies.)  Centralization also magnifies issues of scan quality, bad metadata, reader privacy (PDF), and censorship (PDF). These issues are all much bigger concerns if one company controls the only corpus of orphan works and can dictate the terms on which it’s provided.

Ultimately, the biggest reason to worry about the Google Book Search settlement  is its effects on the rule of law.  The class-action lawsuit by which Google is attempting to gain these rights is a complex, tempermental affair that pushes at the limits of the law and benefits one company exclusively.  A small group of large publishers and a self-appointed cabal of authors claim to speak for all authors worldwide.  And it will be enormously difficult for any other book-scanners to replicate the legal machinations that produced the settlement.  All of these precedents are bad for the integrity of the legal system and for the bottom-up processes of creativity, negotiation, and exchange that characterize a vibrant culture.

If the orphan works problem for books had been solved by Congress, at least there’d have been a place for everyone’s voices in the legislative process.  As it was, the settlement was negotiated in secret between a few parties, and its fate will be determined by judges weighing legal arguments rather making law for the public good.  The settlement is likely to be an enormous net positive for readers, but this is no way to run a culture.

– James Grimmelmann

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google
• Rebecca Jeschke of EFF

In this guest post, Rebecca Jeschke of Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the implications for student privacy.

A college student’s first job is to open his or her mind to new ideas and ways of thinking, challenging personal beliefs and assumptions.  The process of intellectual discovery demands exploration into the different, the challenging, the absurd, and even the uncomfortable.  For many scholars, artists, and scientists, a rigorous look at a broad swath of ideas and theories is the foundation for a life’s work in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

For anyone interested in this kind of intellectual journey, Google Book Search is an intoxicating idea.  The search giant’s plan to scan and digitize millions of books — and allow users to search for and read those books online — would open up the world’s libraries and bookstores to anyone with Internet access.  But without basic privacy protections, Google Book Search will never live up to its promise to change the way students and others read, research, and explore new ideas.  That’s because the “chilling effect” of Google’s tracking could stop these important journeys in their tracks.

Google will be able to monitor and track the books you browse, even knowing how long you spent on each page, and keep a permanent log of every book you’ve ever bought and what pages you’ve read.  When you purchase access to books, Google can use that information to grow its already long dossiers of Internet users — which is bad enough — but then all of that information is vulnerable to police, the government and other third parties who can seek it with a subpoena.

In the physical world, bookstores and libraries have fought for strong privacy protections, requiring the police to get a warrant before getting access to your reading records.  These strong positions were developed precisely to respect our private, personal relationship with reading and learning, and to block any “chilling effect” violating that privacy might have on Americans’ right to explore the world of ideas. That’s why Google Book Search needs a robust, enforceable privacy policy that gives readers as much privacy in online books as we already have today.

A legal settlement that would pave the way for Google Book Search to go forward without these privacy protections is pending approval from a New York federal district court.  But a group of more than two dozen authors and publishers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others, has filed an objection with the judge.  The coalition—including best-selling novelists Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem along with Anthony Romero of the ACLU and science fiction author Cory Doctorow—presents a list of privacy protections that would improve the settlement, including limiting tracking of users and  requiring a court order or judge-approved warrant before disclosure of the information collected, ensuring user control of personal information stored by Google, and making the system transparent to readers.

The future of books is electronic. Something like Google Book Search is what bookstores and libraries will likely look like going forward.  We can’t let reading privacy be the price we pay for opening the door to the world of knowledge.  You can learn more about the issues at stake here.  

– Rebecca Jeschke

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction
• Derek Slater of Google

In this guest post, Derek Slater of Google explains why the settlement is a boon for students and the democratization of culture.

Google Books and our proposed settlement agreement help fulfill copyright’s core objective — opening up access to knowledge and creativity. If approved by the Southern District Court of New York, the settlement will give anyone, anywhere in the U.S., access to millions of books that today are only accessible at a few large universities. Google Books can already help students and scholars track down hard-to-find books, and under this agreement they will be able to read many of those works online as well.

In this way, “[the settlement] will help tear down the geographic and socio-economic barriers that deprive many Americans of equal educational opportunities,” as the United States Students Association stated in a letter to the court. Numerous voices from the civil rights, disability, library and education communities, representing tens of millions of Americans, also strongly support the agreement because it will help equalize access to information.

You can find more specifics about the agreement and its benefits here, but these groups and individuals — the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Federation for the Blind, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Professor Gregory Crane, and many more — explain the benefits to students better than I ever could.

I want to turn my attention to why Students for Free Culture in particular should care. SFC is among the leading voices for the born-digital generation when it comes to copyright. You have not simply pushed for legislation and hoped that Congress will eventually save the day. Instead, you’ve started campaigns to democratize culture at your own schools, and urged technology companies and content creators to build innovative, win-win solutions that meet users’ evolving values and expectations.

The settlement represents this sort of win-win, a practical way to address difficult problems. This case started when rightsholders sued Google for digitizing libraries’ collections. While Google fully believes that this is an example of fair use that would have been upheld in court (and the settlement does not compromise fair use in any way), we settled the lawsuits because it ensures greater access to out-of-print books and broad benefits for the reading public, libraries, rightsholders, and innovators. With strong privacy protections, users will be able to browse and buy digital copies of millions of books that otherwise might be left behind in the digital age.

For too long, copyright law and a thicket of legal uncertainties have locked up most out-of-print books. As copyright scholar Mark Lemley explains, the problem here is generally not that these books are “orphaned,” with rightsholders that cannot be found.  Instead, they have two findable parents – an author and a publisher – but sorting out who actually owns the rights may be hard. Because the transaction costs of licensing these books is high relative to their uncertain market value, these “neglected” works simply gather dust on libraries’ shelves.

The settlement not only enables Google to make out-of-print works accessible, but it will also make it much easier for anyone to license them. It establishes a non-profit Book Rights Registry that will actively look for rightsholders and can help resolve ownership disputes. As rightsholders come forward, the Registry will make information publicly available about which books have been claimed and by whom, and rightsholders can authorize the Registry to license third-parties, including Google’s competitors.  Over time, we believe a significant portion of books will be claimed.

Of course, a small fraction of books will remain truly orphaned. While these books will be among the least commercially valuable, there is still a strong public benefit in opening access to them, and the settlement is one step to that end.  In addition, as we said in our testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, we will let any other book retailer resell access to each out-of-print book, including orphans, that Google can provide access to under the settlement.

That said, this settlement is not a panacea for the challenge of orphan books or orphan works more generally. Google has long supported effective legislation that would make it easier for everyone to use orphan works, and this is still a top priority of ours.

Some have taken the well-intentioned position that legislative reform would be preferable to approval of the settlement. But, as David Sohn of the Center for Democracy of Technology discussed in a blogpost last week, this misconceives the settlement as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, legislation. And it would mean that these books remain locked up, as everyone waits for Congress to address not only orphans but also the far larger category of neglected books.

With the democratization of so much of our culture within reach, it would be tragic to turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

– Derek Slater

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction

The Google Book Search settlement runs hundreds of pages and can be confusing to the most expert of legal minds, but, in either its current or a modified form, it will have profound effects on how students around the world interact with knowledge. In the interest of better informing students about the settlement, Students for Free Culture has solicited the thoughts of a variety of experts who, over the coming days, will provide guest posts reflecting on how the settlement will likely impact students.

In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the official Google website explaining the settlement and the Public Index, an initiative of New York Law School that has an authoritative collection of information ranging from briefs to forums.

Stay tuned!

[Image Credit]

In order to connect organizations and individuals, we recently created a new wiki page that will host volunteer and job opportunities of interest to the free culture community.

We hope individuals will check it out and find some openings of interest and look forward to hearing from more organizations that would like to reach the Students for Free Culture community.

Stuart M. Shieber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University and one of the originators of the compact, discussed the idea behind it last month in an article in PLoS Biology, one of the current leading fee-based open-access journals that stands to benefit from the compact.  “Open-access journal publishing,” he writes, “is at a systemic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.”  While traditional journals receive tremendous subsidies from universities, both in the free services provided by faculty writing and peer reviewing the articles, and then the sometimes exorbitant subscription fees paid by university libraries, open-access journals were, to this point, not given the same advantages.

The Compact would reverse that disadvantage, giving a chance to the newer, freer business models of open-access journals.

We view this as a great step forward for open-access research, and very much in line with the principles we set forward for how an “open university” should behave.    As we establish the criteria for evaluating the openness of a university, this kind of measure is precisely the kind of effort on the part of schools that we hope to recognize.

The Compact is currently seeking additional signatories through their contact form.  Please contact them and try to get your school involved!  These five universities are high-profile enough that this move is definitely noticed throughout the world of academia; we should take advantage of this moment and momentum to get more universities involved and expand the pool of open-access content.

So, at 6:00 PM Pacific / 9:00 PM Eastern, we will all be meeting in the #freeculture room of freenode.

For those of you who need a refresher on what IRC is and how it works, there’s a quick howto after the jump:

First, you can either use a special IRC program or a web portal.

• For Windows, mIRC and XChat are popular options.
• for Mac OS there’s Colloquy
• for GNU/Linux XChat is nice.
• If you don’t want to download a program, the server we use, called freenode, has provided a slick web interface.

Next, select a nickname and connect your program at the server irc.freenode.net, and once you’ve connected, join the room #freeculture .  If you’re using the web portal, you won’t have to do anything to connect to the server, just the room.

If you still have questions, we have a wiki page which talks all about IRC, or feel free to e-mail me at parkerhiggins [at] gmail.com.  Look forward to seeing all you there!

Later this year Barcelona plays host to the world’s first Free Culture Forum. Over four days (October 29—November 1st), activists and researchers will convene to define an action agenda for Free Culture issues in the next decade.

This conference will follow the 2009 OXCARS, an alternative awards ceremony for Free Culture artists.

This is an opportunity to discuss, dance and work together. It’s also a chance to celebrate global perspectives about knowledge, culture and creativity that may differ than those promoted by media and entertainment conglomerates.

The Spanish state is quickly becoming a hotbed of activism, scholarship and research around Free Culture issues, making it a great place to launch a world Free Culture forum. But Spain’s national politics make the Forum an even more ripe opportunity for progress on Free Culture issues:

Why Barcelona? In January 2010, Spanish State will take up the European Presidency of the European Union. Spanish Government has already announced that one of their flagships will be reinforcing the control of the Internet and criminalizing the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world. Furthermore, within this context, Barcelona is closing agreements with cultural institutions to set new agreements to get a fairer sharing of copyrights. These agreements will be spread to other institutions in Catalonia and Spanish State.

In October 29th this year Barcelona will hold the Second Edition of the Oxcars Festival, an international event to honor the defense of culture and to show that other creation channels, as good and with as much quality as traditional ones, exist. The last edition was a success with more than 2000 participants
. Several worldwide voices have recognized the necessity to create international spaces for networking, coordination and building of a global frame for free culture and knowledge issues: the Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such a space.

The organizers have secured the participation of a number of great FC voices and they’re announcing more by the day. Plus, the OXCARS awards will be a guaranteed blast. Many universities provide funding for members of student groups to attend conferences. Check with your department, student union, special activities, or financial aid office to see if they can fund or subsidize your trip. The SFC board and the organizers of the FCForum will happily provide letters of recommendation and other resources.

Students for Free Culture is a partner in the World FCForum, but it’s not the follow-up to SFC’s Free Culture 2008 conference in Berkeley—it’s a brand-new international gathering. We’ll be announcing details about our next SFC conference, Free Culture 2010, in the coming weeks.

Conference schedule:

October 29th: Celebration of the Oxcars Free Culture Awards Festival.

October 30th: Panel presentations

October 31th: Working groups (Legal, Education, Economic, Free Software, Political)

November 1st: Plenary meeting to draft common agenda

More information

Website: http://fcforum.net/

Newsletter: 
http://openfsm.net/projects/freecultureforum/lists/freecultureforumbcn

Organization contact: info |at| fcforum.net

OXCARS 2008: The Movie

oXcars, The Movie from eXgae on Vimeo.

The five of us are thrilled to join (and rejoin) the 2009-2010 board of directors. We’re very excited about guiding Students for Free Culture over the next year—there’s plenty of awesome stuff in store.

You’ll hear more from us over the coming days about what we’ll be doing to re-energize SFC and the Free Culture movement. For now, we want to take the opportunity to (re)introduce ourselves:

Kevin Driscoll completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT last semester where he was a member of the MIT Free Culture chapter and part of the YouTomb research project. Kevin is concerned with encouraging everyday creativity and highlighting unexpected uses of consumer technologies by young people – especially in resistance to systemic oppression. In the fall, he will continue graduate work at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. You can see his digital traces on his superfeed.

Ben Moskowitz co-founded the SFC@Berkeley chapter of Students for Free Culture and created a seminar on the cultural dimensions of piracy. He also co-organized the Free Culture 2008 Conference and the Open Video Conference in NYC.  He is currently a student of Mandarin language at NYU SCPS and serves as General Coordinator of the Open Video Alliance, promoting openness in online video. See http://openvideoconference.org for more. Ben wants to see SFC become a force on campuses all over the world—let’s make it happen!

Kevin Donovan is a rising junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, majoring in Science, Technology & International Affairs with a certificate in International Development. He started the Georgetown chapter of SFC and has worked on technology policy issues at the World Bank’s infoDev program and is currently working on an OpenCourseWare pilot program. He writes about technology policy at Techdirt, his personal blog, and on Twitter.While in South Africa recently Kevin had the chance to go sandboarding, which is easily the coolest sport ever devised.

Christina Ducruet graduated from Brown University in May 2008 with a degree in Modern Culture and Media. While an undergrad, she founded the Brown chapter of Students for Free Culture in reaction to the RIAA lawsuits that hit 20+ campuses in Spring 2007. She’s been involved with SFC ever since, creating resources and organizing campaigns to rally people to the Free Culture movement. Christina is excited and honored to serve on the SFC Board for a second term and thinks the best is yet to come for SFC. She currently lives and works in Connecticut.

Parker Higgins is entering his senior year at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study.  He is the president of the NYU chapter of Students for Free Culture.  Stemming from his previous work with the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of the Miro HD video player, he runs the occasionally updated internet TV channels Free Culture TV and Yes We’re Open.  The channels feature freely-licensed FC-related content and highlight emerging issues for the community. This summer he is volunteering for Creative Commons.

So, what’s next?

You can review the notes of the first 09/10 board meeting here.

The nominations page contains each candidates’ thoughts on SFC and its future. Here is where the five of us agree that our time should be focused:

• Ensuring that the Open University Campaign is a success, potentially through a stand-alone site or committee-based action;
• Collaborating with other organizations and establishing SFC as a key public voice on free culture issues;
• Planning the next Free Culture conference; and
• Making involvement in SFC as user-friendly and accessible to new members and chapters.

Of course, SFC’s strength lies in the awesome people and projects of its local chapters. Chapter leaders can expect to hear from us shortly as we work to bring everyone up to speed with our plans to revitalize SFC. In the meantime, we want to hear from you—what do you think is necessary to keep SFC going strong through this year and beyond? What’s next for SFC? How can we improve? Sound off in the comments.

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!

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

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!

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

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.

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!

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 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

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

Register at Seattle Univeristy CLE site

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 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?

Ray writes,

Procedurally, this will test whether President Obama’s announced policies against members of his administration participating in matters in which they were previously involved will be applied, since partners from Jenner and Block — the architects of the RIAA’s mass litigation campaign — now occupy the second and third highest positions in the new administration’s Department of Justice. According to the President’s announced policies, they should be recused from this case.

Substantively, this will also be an interesting test of whether the Obama administration is going to live up to the President’s pledge to stand up for the people, rather than for the big corporations.

Ray encourages everyone to contact President Obama urging him not to intervene in the case. The White House contact information is here and below is the quick note I submitted. Please do the same!

President Obama’s Department of Justice recent filed papers indicating that it may intervene in a current private dispute in Pennsylvania (Sony BMG Entertainment Media vs. Cloud). The case involved the Constitutionality of the statutory damages awarded in copyright infringment cases (which are thousands of times the size of the actual damage).

This development is worrying because two of the top officials in the Department of Justice (Thomas Perrelli and Don Verrilli), were previously employed as private attorneys for Song BMG and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As you know, President Obama has promised to prohibit members of his administration from participating in matters in which they previously participated. I am writing to discourage the DoJ from intervening in the case and to inquire as to how Mr. Perrelli and Mr. Verrilli will recuse themselves from a decisions involving the RIAA and this particular case.

Thank you and I look forward to your response.

Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

You don’t need me to explain how bad this is. What we need is for everyone to contact Congress and voice your dissent. Head over to Public Knowledge and help now!

Initially, vidders developed codes for discussing their videos. panswendyy recounts one such strategy,

[My friend] uses the first letter of the character’s names, like B for Buffy, so if it were a Fuffy, she’d just put B/F.

Unfortunately, such codes are ineffective responses to the automated Video Identification system deployed by Google in 2007. With no voice with which to argue fair use, many users sacrifice the incomparably large community on YouTube for friendlier service elsewhere.

Before setting sail for imeem (or Vimeo, blip, dailymotion, etc), prolific YouTube users like cmspillane post videos explaining the reasons for their departure. (Ironically, because of its background music, we should expect the signoff itself to disappear.)

In response to an earlier blog post about preserving comments on disabled videos, Dean writes that YouTube might prefer that users are “unable to de-facto redirect to other versions of infringing material.” This should come as no surprise.

Mirroring videos is the most powerful immediate action that video makers can take to protect their rights as authors.

The gradual disappearance of videos from YouTube over the last 18 months progressed largely undetected because of an emergent practice distributed among thousands of community members. A few common searches reveals that the most popular videos are frequently ripped and re-upped under a variety of accounts. Like bees unwittingly pollinating a field of wild flowers, these re-ups are often executed by spammers looking for more hits on their other videos. The preservation of threatened videos is merely a by-product of their unscrupulous pursuit of views!

Moving to another service allows creators to continue practicing their craft but does little to challenge the irresponsible, wasteful industry practice of issuing copyright claims willy-nilly.

Can proactive re-upping and mirroring be an effective response to the accelerating disappearance of fanvids, remixes, home videos, and rare finds from the YouTube collection?

What would an automated mirroring / re-upping tool look like? Could YouTomb data be mobilized toward such an effort?

Remember, a DMCA takedown is not a judgement. YouTube disables access to videos based on mere claims of infringement. If you have had a video identified, the EFF wants to hear from you. Please do not let the short-sighted actions of a frightened industry intimidate you from participating in the creation of your culture!

(Cross-posted to the YouTomb blog.)

The Students for Free Culture board had an eventful weekend. Not only did we get a little storefront going for our fancy new shirts designed by Patrick Moberg, but we filed for incorporation, posted photos from the Free Culture Conference 2008, and sorted out some bigger plans tasks for the organization. You can read all about it in our public board notes and agenda. We’ll have some more announcements shortly (like our plans for Free Culture Conference 2009 and elections), so keep your eyes peeled.

The Internet is being used as the primary organizing tool by people in the global social justice and environmental movements, but many do not fully realize how integral technological and cultural freedoms are to having a sustainable activist movement.

As former Project Manager for CorpWatch‘s corporate accountability wiki, Crocodyl.org, I noticed that many aspects of interacting with a small but focused online community seemed contradictory. The purpose of the project is to increase transparency, accountability and respect for human rights by holding corporations accountable, yet I grappled with the lack of adoption of tools that were analogous to those aims. I wanted to find out if these themes were consistent in other online communities. My participation in a similar online community, WiserEarth.org, also showed that many activists in environmental and social justice circles are not as insistent about their choice of media and technology as they are about what kind of foods they eat, or the clothes that they wear. Although people insist on organic foods, fabrics and biodegradable soap, they tend to settle for less than what Mozilla has dubbed organic software.

WiserEarth is a site dedicated to creating connections, fostering collaboration and sharing knowledge in the environmental sustainability, indigenous rights and social justice movements. Renowned environmentalist, journalist and author Paul Hawken describes the current movement of people working towards these goals in his book, “Blessed Unrest.” His strategy for creating a directory of organizations that make up this movement was the beginning of a bottom up and global effort—now represented by WiserEarth.org. The site grew from his idea and is now a thriving online community and social networking space with over 17,000 members and 110,000 organizations. Through participating in conversations with WiserEarth staff and community members, a few common themes presented themselves.

Though its content is Creative Commons, its software is GPL and it is working on creating an open API, the majority of the community members on WiserEarth, as with most online communities, do not see the bigger picture of why these measures are important to maintaining the Internet as an independent medium where free speech, privacy and human rights are protected. The staff of WiserEarth understands these issues, but WiserEarth’s new feature development process stresses that the users of the WiserEarth platform should be the main drivers of new features. WiserEarth receives constant feedback about what is useful, what works and what doesn’t, and they attempt to accommodate community member requests as a point of process. Unfortunately, the community regularly requests bells and whistles without regard for more abstract considerations such as the negative social consequences of certain technologies.

The site regularly gets requests to integrate proprietary software into its codebase, create applications within closed social networks, and republish copyrighted content outside the terms of fair use. These things are antithetical to the work that WiserEarth wants to facilitate, because its mission is to help the global community connect, collaborate and share knowledge without restrictions. A copyrighted, proprietary and closed Internet—or online community—cannot do this. Often times selecting a free (as in freedom) tool is not considered, because the gravity of this situation is not felt by the community member making the request.

In this case and in others, I would like to see more community members making requests for integration of software, standards and other related tools that are held to a higher ethical standard. WiserEarth has shown a commitment to the underlying values of the larger free culture and open source movements in its actions, but has not formally made a commitment to the sole use of free and open source tools. It would be good for this commitment to be made, but action will not be taken unless there is a groundswell of community support for ethical web tools.

With a “Yes We Can” attitude on the mind this month, I urge people in the Free Culture community to help WiserEarth by being counted among its members. It would be helpful to have Free Culture people join discussions and educate people about open source, free software and the importance of keeping the Internet free for everyone. WiserEarth is an excellent platform for these discussions, because its members represent a large segment of the global social justice movement—namely the ones who are using Internet technology as a part of their social justice organizing. It is a good wedge community for educating and building more connections between communities advocating for software freedom, media justice, social justice and free culture.

Free Culture News is a project of Students for Free Culture and is a blog devoted to happenings in the world of free culture.

There are many sites dedicated to free software, a few to free content, a few to open educational resources, a few to patent law, etc, but there does not seem to be any one definitive resource to go to for general free culture news.  We aim to be that resource.

Keeping our posts minimal and frequent, and pointing to other sources, we try to bring the news as efficiently as possible.

FCNews calls itself “a project of Students for Free Culture” so it’s often confusing why we have two blogs.  One is for news, and the other for…more news?  Before I talk about the differences, let me give a brief history of FCNews.

FCNews sprung out of Free Culture at Virginia Tech, the SFC chapter at Virginia Tech (I’m the chapter head there).  It initially existed as the FC@VT meeting wiki.  My members would post links to news, and because they were not required to write their own analysis, or go through quality control loops they would post a lot of links. It was a wonderful resource because nothing like it really existed, only blogs pertaining to specific areas of free culture.  I read 50+ feeds devoted to free video games, legal battles with the RIAA, etc. and it was really nice to have our wiki as an alternative to that.  Not only could you get all news pertaining to free culture in one place, but you avoid getting tons of articles not related to free culture (eg: Boing Boing and Slashdot are great places to get news about free culture, but for every bit of relevant news, you get a lot of things not really related, and only reading some sections or following some tags usually makes you miss good stuff).

We decided that even though it would require a little more work, we wanted to share that resource with the rest of the world in a nice format.  Thus FCNews was born.

So what exactly are the differences?

Subject matter: SFC’s blog is generally written about SFC as an organization or about events that relate to free culture and education.  It’s not strictly tied down to these matters, but we try to keep it focused on students and on this organization.  FCNews covers free culture in general, meaning it won’t mention everything you find on this blog (because the focus may be too specific), but it will also mention lots of things you don’t find on this blog (because it doesn’t have much to do with SFC as an organization, or to education).

Originality: SFC’s blog consists primarily of original content and in-depth analysis.  FCNews relies heavily on block quotes as to keep the author’s work minimal.

Content length: SFC’s blog contains fairly lengthy articles.  FCNews keeps posts very short and provides the reader with links if they want to investigate further.  A reader of FCNews could read 10 posts in a fairly short amount of time.

Quality: SFC’s blog has a requirement of peer review.  This post will be sent into the hands of another to be proof-read, edited, polished, and handed to you in pristine condition.  It is held to a high editorial standard.  For the sake of speed, and to encourage contribution, every regular poster at FCNews posts without consulting anyone else.  You will find more spelling errors and grammar mistakes there than you will here.  At FCNews, we find the trade-off agreeable.

Frequency: SFC’s blog’s ideal frequency is one post every 1-3 days.  FCNews’ ideal frequency is 3-5 posts in one day.  Neither are really ideal at the moment, but you get the point.

Authorship: SFC’s blog is written by students, and though it wouldn’t mind having a guest blogger occassionally, plans on staying a student-written blog.  FCNews is also currently written by students, but we are open at any time for people outside of the organization becoming regular posters.

Hopefully that answers any questions that you may have had about the differences. The decision between keeping FC@VT news links on our wiki, making our own blog, and writing full articles for the SFC blog was something that was not decided lightly and involved a good deal of discussion.  There was some disagreement when the decision was made, but I think things turned out for the better this way.

So if you have some new and cool news pertaining to education and free culture, where should you post it?  If you just want to quote-and-link, head over to FCNews.  If you want to write a nice well-thought out analysis, post it here, and if it’s of interest to the general public, quote and link yourself on FCNews.  (Or maybe we will do that part without you!  We can be pretty quick sometimes.)

Obviously, this is an abhorrent trend that Students for Free Culture opposes. For more information, check out EFF’s white paper on the subject and EDUCAUSE’s information.

The Case at Hand

The lawsuit centers around Georgia State’s use of electronic reserves to make available digital copies of course readings. The case specifically approaches book chapters, though e-reserves are used at numerous universities for assigned readings of various types. By providing digital copies of course materials, students are able to access a wider range of information in the convenience that digital makes possible. While the publishers assert that Georgia State is part of a “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works,” the university claims that fair use clearly protects their policy.

As you may know, fair use permits the use of copyright “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” It rests upon a fuzzy four factor test which will be the center of this case’s copyright dispute:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

As is evident in the statute, Congress wanted to give wide breadth to education, but the panelists at Friday’s event warned that nonprofit education, such as Georgia State, should not been seen as a “trump card” because a judge may weigh the other factors heavier than the first. So, although the first factor (in addition to the above quoted preamble) clearly support Georgia State’s use of multiple copies for education, the other factors will be addressed, as well.

Factors 3 and 4 will be the focus of the complainants. Although Georgia State is only using portions of the copyrighted works, the suit alleges that “In many cases, the distributed excerpts constitute the very heart of the work at issue.” Although a professor may only have posted a single chapter from a lengthy book, Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises determined that if the used portion is “the heart of the work,” it can infringe, regardless of it’s length.

Finally, because course packs have been decreed a legitimate market, Georgia State is being accused of infringing that potential market of the publishers. However, for many courses, e-reserves are used because purchasing the numerous books used would be prohibitively high for many students. That is, the market doesn’t actually exist because students would be incapable of buying what is placed on e-reserve.

What’s At Stake; What To Do

Because Georgia State qualifies for soveriegn immunity, a lawsuit would only seek injunctive relief instead of damages. The implication is that e-reserves and fair use would be severely limited as a legal fact, even if Georgia State did not have to pay anything in response. In the words of Duke’s Kevin Smith,

“this is an attempt to enforce judicially a “pay-per-use” model of content distribution. The real irony is that it is justified as an attempt to remedy a “free-rider” problem — the claim that universities are appropriating the work of publishers and authors without just compensation. This claim is patently absurd, given the amount of money university libraries invest in published resources, but it is downright offensive when the real issue is clarified. Publishers here are themselves the free-riders, obtaining a huge amount of academic content from the universities and their faculty without compensation. The GSU complaint cites as an irony the fact that one of the professors who is cited as infringing the copyright of Sage Publishing has himself published three articles in Sage journals. The gall of the man! Nowhere is it mentioned that he was required to give up those articles without payment for the privilege of publishing with a company that is now suing his employer to recover even more money for those freely donated articles.”

The pay-per-use model is another example of the publishers seeking to grab more value from universities. Libraries spend millions of dollars purchasing and licensing material from academic publishers. In a physical world, the first-sale doctrine (through library lending and resale) mitigate “pay-per-use” but in a digital world of ubiquitous copying, the publishers want to squeeze more money out of schools.

So what can we do? Here are some ideas, but feel free to add yours in the comments:

1. Educate yourself and school. Raise awareness about fair use and its importance to scholarship and education on campus. Both faculty and students should learn about copyright and fair use. All universities have policies relating to faculty fair use and copyright; what’s yours? Georgia State says that no more than 20% should be used, but what is your school’s policy?
2. Encourage permissive options like public domain and Creative Commons. Faculty and administration need not worry about copyright lawsuits if they are using documents, images and video that is freely available without payment.
3. Support open educational resources. Encourage faculty to publish their work in open access journals. The fewer copyright bullies to sue universities, the fewer chilling effects on education. Open access is the (legal) offense against lawsuits like this one.
4. Get creative: Harvard’s Free Culture chapter created the Thesis Repository to both raise awareness about and quantity of open access scholarship.

As Students for Free Culture embarks upon an ambitious project to open up institutions of higher education, we should keep in mind that universities, and especially their libraries, tend to agree with the principles of access to information, scholarly sharing and creativity. However, they are often held back by actors such as Sage Press who seek to bottle up knowledge. As students we have an important role to play in educating about and assisting the creation of a free culture at universities.

“Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia’s George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU’s Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format.”

Perhaps I am biased because I currently attend George Mason Law and I’m trying to start a Students for Free Culture chapter here, but I think that it would be great if we took this opportunity to stand up for open source software against frivolous lawsuits. Even absurd lawsuits can occupy many years and tons of money and effort to dispose of completely (e.g. the SCO – Linux lawsuits), and Zotero / GMU can use all the support they can get. I found Tim Hwang’s pre-conference proposal for a free culture agenda to be very inspiring, especially his first suggestion to “Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works” and defend creative people who because of their reliance on e.g. fair use may be targets for lawsuits. To be sure, Tim’s proposal was to threaten activism as a deterrent to prevent people from being sued in the first place, but that obviously doesn’t preclude also organizing activism around people who have already been sued. His proposal was also more directed at artists and remixing, but given clause 3 of the Open University Campaign, “The university embraces free software and open standards”, supporting Zotero would be an extremely relevant piece of activism.

How can we support Zotero?

George Mason University itself has taken an excellent first step: in a recent e-mail to the student body, GMU has stated that “The University will not renew the institution-wide license for the citation management software EndNote when it expires on November 30, 2008″, due to the pending litigation. While students and faculty can still purchase their own personal copies of course, GMU recommends that everyone consider migrating to Zotero right away, and they have established a website to help people migrate their citations to Zotero.

It seems to me that if any universities are paying for site licenses for Endnote they should join George Mason University in refusing to renew their Endnote license and instead direct funds towards supporting Zotero development (or other developing open source citation management systems). Companies that sue their customers are usually on their way out anyway, it’s time to get off of the sinking ship and prepare for the future. The person who sent out the e-mail about the decision to the GMU community was John G. Zenelis, the “University Librarian/Associate Vice-President, Information Technology”… there may be someone with a similar position at your school who you could talk to. Why not try talking to your university librarian(s) today about transitioning your school from Endnote to Zotero?

Short of changing your university’s policy, of course, you can just stop using Endnote and start using Zotero yourself! Download Zotero today!

P.S. I don’t have much of a need for citation management software at the moment, but I do use one nifty feature of Zotero which lets you save a “snapshot” of a page exactly the way you are seeing it at the moment. I use it to take snapshots of things created by CGI scripts such as ticket confirmation windows which are impossible to save a link to, things I don’t expect to continue to be available such as articles that are going behind paywalls, and things which I expect to change such as wiki pages. The snapshots are saved as a folder with all of the HTML, images, javascript etc. which are necessary to render the page exactly the way it was, and the snapshots can be opened by any web browser. If this sounds nifty to you, give Zotero a try even if you don’t need citation management software. I know this isn’t Zotero’s primary purpose, but I enjoy it nevertheless The more people who use it the better, even if it’s not for the original intended purpose.

Planning to participate in an Open Access Day event on your campus? Want to help promote Open Access Day? Participate in the OA Day synchroblogging competition!

There are 4 key points that we would like you to address in your post (these are the same questions that we asked the stars of the Voices of Open Access Video Series that we will also release on that day):

* Why does Open Access matter to you?
* How did you first become aware of it?
* Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
* What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

To enter the competition, all you have to do is blog on this topic on October 14, 2008. We’ll use Google News/Technorati to track entries – to make this easier please use the phrase “Open Access Day” in your post.

The winner gets a bag of PLoS/scienceblogs.com goodies. Remember, in order to be eligible, you have to post about it today. So get cracking!

Live Blogging:
Tim Hwang blogging @ The US Bureau of Fabulous Bitches
Brian Rowe blogging @ Freedom for IP
Luis G. Lira @ Scitechbizdev.blogspot.com in Spanish

Wraps ups are being published by:
Kevin Driscoll @ todo mundo
Kevin Donovan @ Blurring Borders

Micro Blogging:
Identica search for #fc2008
Brian Rowe, 3L Seattle University Law, Twitter: Sarterus Identi.ca: Sarterus
Tim Hwang, Harvard Berkman Center, Twitter: TimHwang
Mike Linksvayer, VP for Creative Commons, Identi.ca: mlinksva
shizhao Twitter: shizhao

I‘m twitter @shizhao
(I am sure there are other mircobloggers out there and I will update this list over time)

Post a comment or respond on the list to be added to the blog list.
The tag for the conference is fc2008 the hashtag is #fc2008

Additionally our IRC channel on freenode is #freeculture

Saturday October 11th
Feeling So Free @ Blake’s On Telegraph
8:00pm-2:00am
18+ (Bring the above flyer to get in after 10pm.)
21+ to drink
No cover

Three srsly sick DJs (and me!) on two floors:

DJ Ripley (Baltimore Club/ Dancehall/ Dubstep)
Kid Kameleon (Mashit/ XLR8R)
Refusenik (Thug Rave)
Lone Wolf (Hip Hop)

Video artist or VJ? We’d like to have your video running during the party. Get in touch with me via kevin//at//freeculture.org if you’re interested!

Several of our people need warm places to rest their free culture-loving heads this weekend. If you can help out, or know a good place to stay, please hit me up on email as soon as possible: kevin //at// freeculture.org

Your generosity is deeply appreciated!

For our upcoming conference in Berkeley, we’ve been blessed with some sponsors who have given us money to fund students to travel from far away to the conference. We still have some of that money left!

So if you are a member of a Students for Free Culture chapter, or are trying to get one off the ground, we would love it if you would come. We would love it so much we can offer to pay (as per our travel funding guidelines) for your flight to Berkeley. It’s been a joy working with the Berkeley team and the other SFC people organizing the conference. It takes place very soon: October 11-12.

So dear all of you students working to promote Free Culture, wherever you are – join us in Berkeley in a week. Get in touch with us by emailing conf08 at freeculture.org.

(My thanks go to others on the conf08 team for reaching out to get this funding!)

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.

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:

Hello,
we’ve just released a tiny abstract pretentious game called Free Culture
Game.

It can be considered an experiment of procedural rhetorics, a playable
theory or an advergame for a Spanish collective called exgae
(http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/whats-exgae).

The goal is to provide a simplified interactive rendition of theories
and propositions about knowledge capitalism (es. Negri, Lessing, Wark).
It’s a game you cannot lose. Even if you stop playing the game always
tend to a dynamic equilibrium between market and Common. The basic
assumption is that there will never be a complete privatization of
shared knowledge and without a strong opposition (represented by the
player’s action) the forces of the market will indefinitely exploit the
innovative ideas emerging from the society.

Link:
http://www.molleindustria.org/freeculturegame-eng
warning: it’s quite hard for non-gamers

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.

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!

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.

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]

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Map of Wesnoth

Wesnoth is a pretty neat turn-based strategy game with retro graphics.  It was my first time playing, and I really enjoyed it (except for the getting my butt kicked part).  One of these days I might actually be good at it and beat Karen and Nelson.

We’ll probably be doing another game night next week, so head over to Free Culture Gaming to keep an eye out for more free video game fun.

The Doha Development Round of trade negotiations originated to directly address issues of trade impeding the world’s poorest nations. These include intellectual property issues like access to patented medicine, as well as other issues, like agricultural subsidies. Just last week, talks at the Doha Round collapsed, leaving me to wonder how long it will be until the United States starts doing what’s right with regard to these critical issues.

I rediscovered Doha by hanging around on Wikipedia: a few weeks ago I noticed a bunch of work happening on the Doha Round article. I’m a sucker for participatory culture after all. But check out the article. See anything missing? I see a dearth of images that would be nice if we rectified (the one image on there today was added just yesterday). And look, the WTO is kind enough to make a photo gallery publicly available. It would be so great if we could include those pictures on Wikipedia.

So, Free Culturites, I have a call to action:

Email publications@wto.org and ask if they would be so kind as to release some or all of their photos under a free copyright license (something like CC-BY would be fantastic). After all, it’s not like the WTO exists to make money off of its photo gallery somehow. Myself and a fellow editor are waiting to hear back from them, and I figure some support couldn’t hurt.

Oh, and if you feel like it, jump in and help improve the article. Long live participatory culture!

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

When I asked Conley Owens, Free Culture VT founder, why he thought FC Gaming is important, he responded:

Because it’s FOSS and it’s gaming… what could be cooler?

Because gaming drives computing. It’s the reason why graphics cards are so great and cheap, because of gamers. And if gaming can drive hardware, it can drive software. Right now I have tons of computer scientist friends who only use Windows because they can’t play their favorite games on GNU/Linux. If free games were more prevalent, perhaps they would switch. If you get the software development (and game development) community switching to a free platform, they will in turn help switch the world to freedom.

Play free games, free the world!

Hopefully that is enough motivation to join FC Gaming

Free Culture Gaming will be holding its first game night this Saturday August 2nd at 8pm EDT (tomorrow night), and we hope you will join us. For this game night, we will be playing The Battle for Wesnoth, an excellent turn-based strategy game. Sadly the Wesnoth web server is currently down, but I think we should give them support anyway during this trying time for them. You can still download the game from the Wesnoth SourceForge project for Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can still play multiplayer games if you go to Multiplayer->Connect to Server and choose the 2nd (or 3rd) option instead of the official server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please use version 1.4.4 of Battle for Wesnoth, or at least another version from the 1.4 series. Older or newer versions will not work well or at all.

Meet us in the Free Culture Gaming IRC channel at #fcgame on irc.freenode.net to coordinate with us (go here for details), or just join the 2nd alternative Wesnoth server and find us there. Hope to see you then!

UPDATE: The Battle for Wesnoth official website is now, um, sort of up again, so you may be able to download the game from there now as well. We might even be able to play on the normal official server! I guess we’ll find out tonight ^_^

The two new channels should be of interest to readers of this blog: one is called Free Culture TV, and it contains videos about free culture, or of particular relevance to members of the free culture community.  There is a list of the videos on the channel’s Miro Guide page, and I plan on adding many more in the coming weeks.

The second channel is called Yes, We’re Open! Free Movies, Music Videos and TV and is meant for all sorts of openly licensed entertainment.  As the name suggests, this includes everything from very short clips to feature length movies and documentaries, as long as it’s been released under an open license.  Again, the Miro Guide page has more information.

So here comes the pitch: I want all the help I can get with these.  If you know of something really great that’s not on here yet, chances are I’ve just missed it, and I’d love to include it.  You can e-mail me at parker [at] pculture [dot] org and I’ll get right back to you.  Currently, I don’t have plans to create original content for either channel, but if anybody expressed interest in making or helping to make something, I’d be happy to explore it!

Again, these channels are made for SFC and the free culture community, so if there’s something you’d like to see on it, please let me know!

Yes, We're Open! and Free Culture TV

Then perhaps it is time that you began boycotting Hasbro’s Scrabble, in all its forms. Why not:

• Refuse to use official Scrabble online games - Let’s face it, they’re not as good as Scrabulous was, anyway. You can join the Facebook group We refuse to use official Scrabble app since Hasbro shut down Scrabulous or probably a dozen others like it.
• Continue playing Scrabulous anyway – Hasbro does not own the copyrights to Scrabble outside the USA and Canada, some other company does. So, if you connect to Facebook from an IP address located outside the US and Canada, then you can continue playing Scrabulous just like the good old days. This Facebook group has easy instructions on how to do so, by connecting to Facebook through a proxy server. A silver lining to this lawsuit might be getting more people using the Firefox web browser and the FoxyProxy add-on.
• Avoid buying products from Hasbro – Do you really need a new Scrabble board? Aren’t there a gazillion Scrabble boards floating around people’s attics and garage sales that you could pick up for a song? Same thing goes for other Hasbro games! Exercise your first sale rights and buy used games instead.
• If you have a Scrabble board, don’t play Scrabble on it, play a different word game - What’s so good about the exact copyrighted version of Scrabble anyway? The Scrabulous developers realized this and released the more flexible Wordscraper, a Scrabble-esque game that lets you change the board/rules. If you have a physical Scrabble board, there are innumerable word games you could play with it. You could use the tiles to play Anagrams, a lovely fast-paced party game that predates Scrabble, or perhaps even Bananagrams. Or, create your own entirely new word game, and go down in history as the inventor of something even better than Scrabble!
• Make your own Scrabble-esque boards - Why buy it when you can make it yourself? The tiles might be a bit tricky (although a RepRap 3d printer would probably make short work of it once it’s generally available to the public) but it should be child’s play to draw a grid and fill in the boxes with double word scores or more interesting variations.

Honestly, Hasbro’s rent-seeking with the Scrabble copyright is a really annoying example of how copyright can hinder creativity rather than encouraging it. Scrabble was invented in 1938, and sold by the creator in 1948 to someone who could commercialize it (not Hasbro, Hasbro bought the copyright much later around 1986). How much real innovation has been done since then with Scrabble by people who benefit from the copyright royalties? Isn’t it telling that the innovators here innovated without benefiting from copyright controls or copyright royalties? This is a clear case of copyright outlasting its usefulness. Perhaps more importantly, I think it’s rotten that Hasbro is shutting down Scrabulous for bringing Scrabble to life again for a new generation… that’s not a proper reward. I’d love to send a message to Hasbro that their behavior is really uncool. Just because Hasbro has the legal power to shut down Scrabulous doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, either for their bottom line (see the Economist’s cautious endorsement of piracy) or for creativity in the field of gaming.

What do you folks think? Anything I missed? Anything you disagree with? If other SFC members and the Internet at large agree that these are good practices that SFC should follow, perhaps this could be adopted as an official SFC document?

Best Practices for Online Video

• Exercise your fair use rights - If you don’t use it, you lose it! When you need to quote something or reference something, do it, don’t be scared. Just follow the Center for Social Media’s “Code of Best Practices in Fair use for Online Video“.
• Open content licenses - Make it obviously legal to share, cut up and remix your content. Use a Creative Commons license that allows for remixing. (All current CC licenses allow for sharing, at least for noncommercial purposes.)
• Encourage remixing - Provide a copy of the video in an uncompressed, unedited form somewhere. This can make it easier for people to reuse your content in future projects.
• Provide a copy in an open video format - Use the Ogg Theora video format! It’s an open standard, meaning we know exactly how it works, and it is not patent-encumbered, meaning we don’t know of any patents that would prevent you from using it however you want, and nobody can force you or anyone else to pay royalties for the “privilege” of using the format. See Xiph.org’s page on Theora’s benefits and why Ogg Theora matters for internet TV. Blip.tv allows you to upload in Ogg Theora and it will attempt to play Theora videos in your browser using the Cortado java video applet (see the Inquirer article on this).
• Provide multiple formats - That said, you should try to provide as many video formats as practical. Give people options, in case they have trouble playing or using one or more of your formats. Just make sure one of those options is always an open format.
• Open source video editing – When possible, capture and edit your videos with open source tools, and promote those tools to others. Unfortunately, it is currently difficult to do FOSS video editing on Mac OS X. It is slightly easier to do it on Linux with tools such as Kdenlive, Kino, and Cinelerra, and Linux distributions dedicated to working with multimedia such as Ubuntu Studio. Also, the next version of VLC media player, 0.9, is expected to make it easy to do screencasting / screen capturing on any platform, with a nice GUI / wizard to walk you through the process.
• Open source media server - Use open source software to serve up your video. This is easy if you are video podcasting: any blogging software that produces a web feed with enclosures will do, such as WordPress. In fact, with WordPress, all you have to do is link to your video file in a format WordPress knows about (MP3 and MP4, from quick testing).  This automatically packages the video in an enclosure in your RSS feed so that anyone with a smart feed reader can automatically download the video. The Podpress plugin for WordPress should make this even easier. An open source media server for streaming video can be a bit more complex. The option I am helping SPARC pursue at the moment is ePresence, an apparently mature open source project which unfortunately requires a Windows computer at the moment, but which is supposed to be migrating to Linux in the distant future.
• Open source client - People should be able to view the video using 100% open source software, and you should encourage them to do so. Miro, a free / open source internet tv and video player, is great for podcasting. As for streaming media, just make sure it plays in VLC.
• Offer a downloadable format - Sometimes people want to access video while not connected to the Internet. Offering a download link lets people with slow connections watch your high resolution video through the power of delayed gratification. Also, letting people download your stuff aids distributed preservation.
• Decentralized distribution system - Services like Youtube offer convenience, but we at Students for Free Culture believe any one player monopolizing video distribution is bad. It’s good to preserve options of self-hosting and self-aggregating available, and to use them in parallel with other distribution methods.
• Redundancy and long-term preservation - Post your video to multiple locations so if one goes down it will still be available. Be especially sure to use the Internet Archive, as that is meant for long-term preservation. (Blip.tv will crossload video to the Internet Archive for you.)
• Provide good metadata - Tags and other descriptors can make it easier for people to find your video. Thumbnails can make it easier to skim through your content (automatically provided by Internet Archive). Categorize! Annotate!
• Write out a transcript - Gives you more googlejuice / makes your site more attractive to search engines! Also more accessible for the disabled.
• Provide feeds and other ways to subscribe to your content - If people like what you have, make it easy for them to get further updates.
• Bookmarking / social networking / embedding - make it easy for people to save the location of a video, and to share it with others. Naturally, try to support open source tools when possible, such as the Connotea scholarly bookmarking software.
• UPDATE: Film in the highest quality possible, and compress for the web later - Do not film in low-resolution with a mediocre camera simply because Youtube videos are typically low-resolution. First of all, High Definition video is slowly gaining in popularity on the web, as bandwidth and storage become cheaper and screens get bigger and higher-density pixelwise. Distribution platforms like Miro make it easy for even people with sluggish internet connections to enjoy HD video, since Miro and other podcasting software can download content when you are not around (e.g. when you are sleeping) and serve it to you later. Although you will want a low-res version for people with slower internet connections, you should also publish an HD version for those early adopters on the cutting edge. Second of all, you can reduce the quality of your video by compressing it or reducing the resolution (e.g. by digitally zooming in on a person’s face) whenever you like, but it is impossible to increase your video to a higher resolution if you did not record a high-resolution version. Capture the best video you can, and compress it later to make the file size small enough to fit through the Intertubes.

UPDATE: For more suggestions and information on creating online video, check out Make Internet TV.

Check out the agenda for the meeting on our wiki, if you want to know what we will be talking about, or even add items to the agenda yourself

If you don’t know what IRC is, check out our IRC wiki page, or just click on the Mibbit widget below to go directly to our IRC chat room!

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!

Students for Free Culture Conference 2008

October 11 and 12
Berkeley, CA

Lots and lots of work to be done between now and then but it’s exciting to have a date and a location! (Especially one that is not in the Northeast US!)

We are currently raising money to fly out as many people as possible. Any ideas for funding sources are deeply appreciated!

I’d just like to take this opportunity to say what a great project Firefox is for free culture. It is an excellent web browser, and its popularity across every platform provides a nice example of open source software for us to refer to when explaining the concept. It’s also notable that one of the greatest things about Firefox is its add-ons / extensions, which are unmatched by any other browser as far as I’m concerned, and the fact that Firefox makes it really easy to play around with its guts is another great talking point when explaining the open source ethos. (I frequently compare proprietary software to a car with its hood welded shut, while open source projects are more like ordinary cars.)

Firefox has not been perfect. For starters, it has not been completely open source software, since its crash reporter in Firefox 2 was the proprietary program Talkback. This will be fixed in Firefox 3, which replaces Talkback with the open source project Breakpad, and that alone should serve as a good incentive for free culture advocates to download it ASAP.

Also, the silly trademark controversy when Mozilla refused to let community-produced versions of Firefox bear the Firefox name or logo did a lot to generate (minor levels of) ill will within the open source community. Personally I think that Mozilla’s treatment of the trademark issues is heavy-handed and excessive. Compare Mozilla’s approach with Lawrence Lessig’s approach towards the “free culture” brand. In 2004 I registered the domains freeculture.org and freeculture.net in anticipation of founding this organization, based on Lessig’s use of the term “free culture” in his OSCON 2002 presentation. I was completely unaware that Lessig was about to publish a book under the name “free culture”. When heard about the release of the book, I immediately e-mailed Lessig to apologize for grabbing all of the good domains (freeculture.com had already been snapped up by a cybersquatter). His response was something like, “No problem! Let’s take this opportunity to show everyone how unnecessary heavy-handed protection of trademark is. I’ll link to your website from my book’s website and you can link to my website from yours, and that should clear up any confusion that people may have if they accidentally visit the wrong website.” And that’s exactly what we did! You can still see the link to Lessig’s site in the upper right hand corner of our website, and we are still linked to from his book’s front page. When a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Debian promotes Firefox they are doing Mozilla a service, and Mozilla should just work with them to try to keep the quality of the community Firefox builds up to spec rather than preventing them from giving Mozilla free positive publicity. If Lessig had demanded that we shut down our website or stop using the free culture name, Students for Free Culture may not exist at all today, or at least not in a recognizable form. Perhaps co-founder Luke Smith and I would have been discouraged by this unfriendly treatment and turned to some other form of activism where we felt more welcome, or perhaps we would not have attracted as much support without flying the free culture banner. Who knows? All I know is that this relationship between us and Lessig has been beneficial for both of us, and I’m glad that Lessig promoted and supported it rather than threatening us with trademark law.

That said, these are minor quibbles among friends, and I do not think that these complaints about Firefox are a reason to refuse to see Firefox for the great boon to free culture that it is. I will be downloading Firefox 3 today, and I hope that you will join me in setting a world record!

I couldn’t believe it!  We must owe them so much money!  In a hurry, I wrote a little command to see how many times we infringed.

tput sc && wget --wait=1 -qr -O blah.txt http://freeculture.org & tail -f blah.txt |
sed -r ":a /([^<][^\/][^a][^>]|^.{,4})$/N; s/\n//g; ta" | egrep -o "" |
awk '/|<\/img>)/{ct++}{printf("%d", ct)}{system("tput rc")}' && rm blah.txt

It counted 918 times before I killed it! The horror!

The Singaporean firm VueStar’s website claims it “offers to URL owners the opportunity to secure a ‘Licence of Use’ for locating web sites that are using visual images’ pursuant to Patents granted and in existence in several parts of the World.” We’ve heard outlandish claims like this before, and indeed any four-year-old can put up a website asking the world for money, but news articles indicate they are already asking for royalties on these patents from websites, including non-profit websites like Mr. Alvin Koh’s arofanatics.com according to that link.

Using images in web links is pretty much as old as using images on the web at all. Patents are only issuable in the case that there is no “prior art” indicating the invention is already known. In this case, one must imagine both someone so cynical to think the Singaporean patent office would let this patent through as well as a patent examiner who simply has no idea that this is a universal way to use images on the web. As a result, this company could claim we infringed at least 918 times.

In truth, the patent would disappear in court – the prior art is clear as day. But how much money would be spent on lawyers by people defending themselves from VueStar first?

(Please note that using this command may put undue stress on the web server and admin(s).)

“We call upon public libraries around the world to remove the unethical Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies currently locking down many of their digital collections. DRM compromises public trust for the sake of providing limited access to popular works to some in the short-term. As concerned patrons, we request that libraries immediately establish policies against the use of DRM technologies.

DRM requires users to cede control of their computers to third-party corporations, so they can restrict when and how they may access “checked out” books or audio files. This is an inappropriate and unethical requirement for a public library to impose on its patrons. The notion of checking something out is based on physical scarcity — to be manufacturing scarcity where none exists is entirely contrary to a library’s mission.

Libraries that use DRM are submitting patrons to the onerous and unethical legal terms involved with purchasing, installing, and using software such as Microsoft Windows and the Windows Media Player. In the case of Microsoft Windows, this entails agreeing to terms that allow Microsoft to delete software and data that the user legally owns and has created or installed on their own machines. For a library to require their patrons to agree to such End User License Agreements as a prerequisite for gaining access to its collection is an injustice.

These software requirements drive the sales of DRM technology vendors, such as Microsoft and OverDrive, providing an incentive for patrons to discontinue using software and materials that do not impose DRM. The common argument that DRM and proprietary software are necessary because publishers require them becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the library is using its own market power to encourage their use, hurting the emergence of competing alternatives in the process.

Random House, the largest publisher of eBooks and audio books worldwide, recently announced its decision to drop DRM from the vast majority of its catalog. Random House made this decision after doing a study which found zero cases of DRM-free works being shared illegally. They found that it was ONLY the DRMed titles that were being shared.

The fear, uncertainty, and doubt used by the software industry to convince publishers and distributors to use DRM has blindsided the public and institutions of public trust. Little consideration has been given to the ethical and long-term implications of accepting and encouraging the use of DRM. Defending the public interest means thwarting DRM.

For these reasons, we ask that libraries immediately embargo the use of DRM on their collections and establish formal policies against it. There are undoubtedly many challenges facing libraries today that need to be considered, but few can be as timely or as important as the way the library defines itself and its role in our digital age.”

Personally, I’m not sure about how libraries, especially academic ones, are going to react to this proposed ‘embargo.’ Kicking DRM to the curb is an idea that I agree with wholeheartedly, but many of the licensed resources such as Scholarly Journals, have a pretty vivid history of inflexibility in regards to DRM as a means of protecting their products.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on in the very near future, as well as a topic that Students for Free Culture might take a public stance on. I’ll post whatever I find that’s of interest!

PS: Check the pic of Gavin I nicked from Wikipedia’s DRM page…

~Excelsior!

• Board Meeting 04-27-2008
• Board Meeting 03-08-2008

We’ll be updating this page on the wiki: Meetings with future links to minutes so keep an eye out there if you’re interested in following SFC’s board meetings in excruciating detail.

But if you’re not interested in digging through the minutes here are a couple of things we’ll be working on over the next couple of months:

• New T-Shirts are on their way.The wonderful Patrick Moberg of BustedTees has graciously agreed to create some new art for shirts that we’ll be printing soon. He’s done a great job and the designs are almost done, so we’ll be releasing more info about that soon. We should have the t-shirts printed and ready by the end of the summer.
• The Fall 2008 Students for Free Culture Conference. Mark your calendars for October 10th-13th 2008 as we’ve scheduled Columbus Day weekend for our next big conference. We’ve chosen Berkeley, CA as the location for the summit and we’ll be raising funds to make sure we get the right people there to learn, help, and grow the organization and their chapters.
• Incorporation. Thats right, you heard it here first. SFC will soon be an official non-profit entity. This will allow us to file for 501c3 status and solicit tax free donations. Creative Commons‘ original counsel Diane Cabell has been an enormous help through this process and we should be done with it soon.

As always, please feel free to contact anyone on the board, or leave a comment here if you’d like to give feedback about our ideas.

Thanks & Good luck with finals!