FreeCulture.org
Encyclopedia
Students for Free Culture, formerly known as FreeCulture.org, is an international student organization working to promote free culture
ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig
, who wrote the book Free Culture
, and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons
, the Electronic Frontier Foundation
, and Public Knowledge
. Students for Free Culture has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.
Students for Free Culture is sometimes referred to as "FreeCulture", "the Free Culture Movement", and other variations on the "free culture" theme, but none of those are its official name. It is officially Students for Free Culture, as set for in the new bylaws that were ratified by its chapters on October 1, 2007, which changed its name from FreeCulture.org to Students for Free Culture.
It has yet to publish a more "official" mission statement, but some of its goals are:
which would eventually become the first Students for Free Culture chapter. The SCDC was founded in 2003 by students Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky, and was originally focused on issues related to free software
, digital restrictions management, and treacherous computing, inspired largely by the Free Software Foundation
. After watching Lawrence Lessig
's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture" however, they expanded the club's scope to cover cultural participation in general (rather than just in the world of software and computers), and began tackling issues such as copyright reform.
Sure enough, Diebold sent takedown notices under the DMCA to the SCDC's ISP
, Swarthmore College. Swarthmore took down the SCDC website, and the SCDC co-founders sought legal representation. They contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation
for help, and discovered that they had an opportunity to sign on to an existing lawsuit against Diebold, OPG v. Diebold
, with co-plaintiffs from a non-profit ISP called the Online Policy Group who had also received legal threats from Diebold. With pro bono legal representation from EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic, they sued Diebold for abusing copyright law to suppress freedom of speech online. After a year of legal battles, the judge ruled that posting the e-mails online was a fair use
, and that Diebold had violated the DMCA by misrepresenting their copyright claims over the e-mails.
The network of contacts that Smith and Pavlosky built during the lawsuit, including dozens of students around the country who had also hosted the Diebold memos on their websites, gave them momentum they needed to found an international student movement based on the same free culture principles as the SCDC. They purchased the domain name Freeculture.org and began building a website, while contacting student activists at other schools who could help them start the organization.
less than a month beforehand.) The SCDC became the first Freeculture.org chapter (beginning the process of changing its name to Free Culture Swarthmore), and students from other schools in the area who attended the launch went on to found chapters on their campuses, including Bryn Mawr College
and Franklin and Marshall.
licenses and the public domain
(Undead Art) to opposing business method patent
s (Cereal Solidarity). While these one-shot websites succeeded in attracting attention from the press and encouraged students to get involved, they didn't directly help the local chapters, and the organization now concentrates less on web campaigns than it did in the past. However, their recent Down With DRM video contest was a successful "viral video" campaign against DRM
, and internet campaigns remain an important tool in free culture activism.
(NYU), Harvard, MIT
, Fordham Law, Dartmouth
, University of Florida
, Swarthmore
, USC
, Emory
, Reed
, and Yale
.
The NYU chapter made headlines when it began protesting outside of record stores against DRM on CDs during the Sony rootkit scandal, resulting in similar protests around New York and Philadelphia.
In 2008, the MIT
chapter developed and released YouTomb
, a website to track videos removed by DMCA takedown from YouTube
.
Other recent activities at local chapters include:
With the passage of official bylaws, Students for Free Culture now has a clear governance structure which makes it accountable to its chapters. The supreme decision-making body is the Board of Directors, which is elected once a year by the chapters, using a Schulze method
for voting. It is meant to make long-term, high-level decisions, and should not meddle excessively in lower-level decisions. Practical everyday decisions will be made by the Core team, composed of any students who are members of chapters and meet the attendance requirements. Really low-level decisions and minutiae will be handled by a Coordinator, who ideally will be a paid employee of the organization, and other volunteers and assistants. A new Board of Directors was elected in February 2008, and a new Core Team was assembled shortly thereafter. There is no coordinator
yet.
Free Culture movement
The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media....
ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...
, who wrote the book Free Culture
Free Culture (book)
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004."There has never been a...
, and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
, the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
, and Public Knowledge
Public Knowledge
Public Knowledge is a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group that is involved in intellectual property law, competition, and choice in the digital marketplace, and an open standards/end-to-end internet....
. Students for Free Culture has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.
Students for Free Culture is sometimes referred to as "FreeCulture", "the Free Culture Movement", and other variations on the "free culture" theme, but none of those are its official name. It is officially Students for Free Culture, as set for in the new bylaws that were ratified by its chapters on October 1, 2007, which changed its name from FreeCulture.org to Students for Free Culture.
Goals
Students for Free Culture has stated its goals in a "manifesto":The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.
It has yet to publish a more "official" mission statement, but some of its goals are:
- decentralization of creativity—getting ordinary people and communities involved with art, science, journalism and other creative industries, especially through new technologies
- reforming copyright, patent, and trademark law in the public interest, ensuring that new creators are not stifled by old creators
- making important information available to the public
Purpose
According to its website, Students for Free Culture has four main functions within the free culture movement:- Creating and providing resources for its chapters and for the general public
- Outreach to youth and students
- Networking with other people, companies and organizations in the free culture movement
- Issue advocacy on behalf of its members
Initial stirrings at Swarthmore College
Students for Free Culture had its origins in the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC, now Free Culture Swarthmore), a student group at Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
which would eventually become the first Students for Free Culture chapter. The SCDC was founded in 2003 by students Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky, and was originally focused on issues related to free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
, digital restrictions management, and treacherous computing, inspired largely by the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
. After watching Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...
's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture" however, they expanded the club's scope to cover cultural participation in general (rather than just in the world of software and computers), and began tackling issues such as copyright reform.
The OPG v. Diebold case
Within a couple of months of founding the SCDC, Smith and Pavlosky became embroiled in the controversy surrounding Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), a voting machine manufacturer accused of making bug-ridden and insecure electronic voting machines. The SCDC had been concerned about electronic voting machines using proprietary software rather than open source software, and kept an eye on the situation. Their alarm grew when a copy of Diebold's internal e-mail archives leaked onto the internet, revealing questionable practices at Diebold and possible flaws with Diebold's machines, and they were spurred into action when Diebold began sending legal threats to voting activists who posted the e-mails on their websites. Diebold was claiming that the e-mails were their copyrighted material, and that anyone who posted these e-mails online was infringing upon their intellectual property. The SCDC posted the e-mail archive on its website and prepared for the inevitable legal threats.Sure enough, Diebold sent takedown notices under the DMCA to the SCDC's ISP
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
, Swarthmore College. Swarthmore took down the SCDC website, and the SCDC co-founders sought legal representation. They contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
for help, and discovered that they had an opportunity to sign on to an existing lawsuit against Diebold, OPG v. Diebold
OPG v. Diebold
OPG v. Diebold, 337 F. Supp. 2d 1195 , more officially known as Online Policy Group , Nelson Chu Pavlosky, and Luke Thomas Smith v. Diebold, Incorporated and Diebold Election Systems, Incorporated , was a lawsuit involving an archive of Diebold's internal company e-mails and Diebold's contested...
, with co-plaintiffs from a non-profit ISP called the Online Policy Group who had also received legal threats from Diebold. With pro bono legal representation from EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic, they sued Diebold for abusing copyright law to suppress freedom of speech online. After a year of legal battles, the judge ruled that posting the e-mails online was a fair use
Fair use
Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
, and that Diebold had violated the DMCA by misrepresenting their copyright claims over the e-mails.
The network of contacts that Smith and Pavlosky built during the lawsuit, including dozens of students around the country who had also hosted the Diebold memos on their websites, gave them momentum they needed to found an international student movement based on the same free culture principles as the SCDC. They purchased the domain name Freeculture.org and began building a website, while contacting student activists at other schools who could help them start the organization.
FreeCulture.org launches at Swarthmore
On April 23, 2004, Smith and Pavlosky announced the official launch of FreeCulture.org, in an event at Swarthmore College featuring Lawrence Lessig as the keynote speaker (Lessig had released his book Free CultureFree Culture (book)
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004."There has never been a...
less than a month beforehand.) The SCDC became the first Freeculture.org chapter (beginning the process of changing its name to Free Culture Swarthmore), and students from other schools in the area who attended the launch went on to found chapters on their campuses, including Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
and Franklin and Marshall.
Internet campaigns
FreeCulture.org began by launching a number of internet campaigns, in an attempt to raise its profile and bring itself to the attention of college students. These have covered issues ranging from defending artistic freedom (Barbie in a Blender) to fighting the Induce Act (Save The iPod), from celebrating Creative CommonsCreative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
licenses and the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
(Undead Art) to opposing business method patent
Business method patent
Business method patents are a class of patents which disclose and claim new methods of doing business. This includes new types of e-commerce, insurance, banking, tax compliance etc. Business method patents are a relatively new species of patent and there have been several reviews investigating the...
s (Cereal Solidarity). While these one-shot websites succeeded in attracting attention from the press and encouraged students to get involved, they didn't directly help the local chapters, and the organization now concentrates less on web campaigns than it did in the past. However, their recent Down With DRM video contest was a successful "viral video" campaign against DRM
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
, and internet campaigns remain an important tool in free culture activism.
An increased emphasis on local chapters
Today the organization focuses on providing services to its local campus chapters, including web services such as mailing lists and wikis, pamphlets and materials for tabling, and organizing conferences where chapter members can meet up. Active chapters are located at schools such as New York UniversityNew York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
(NYU), Harvard, MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, Fordham Law, Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
, University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
, Swarthmore
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
, USC
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, Emory
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...
, Reed
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
, and Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
.
The NYU chapter made headlines when it began protesting outside of record stores against DRM on CDs during the Sony rootkit scandal, resulting in similar protests around New York and Philadelphia.
In 2008, the MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
chapter developed and released YouTomb
YouTomb
YouTomb is a website built to track videos removed by popular video-sharing website YouTube. The site operates a searchable database of recent video removals on YouTube. It tracks not only DMCA takedowns but also terms of use violations and user removals. Those videos removed due to DMCA takedowns...
, a website to track videos removed by DMCA takedown from YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
.
Other recent activities at local chapters include:
- art shows featuring Creative CommonsCreative CommonsCreative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
-licensed art, - mix CD-exchanging flash mobs,
- film-remixing contests,
- iPodIPodiPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
liberating parties, where the organizers help people replace the proprietary DRM-crippled operating system on their iPods with an open source system like RockboxRockboxRockbox is a replacement for the standard firmware in various forms of digital audio players . It offers an alternative to the player's operating system, in many cases without removing the original firmware, which provides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functions...
, - Antenna Alliance, a project that provides free recording space to bands, releases their music online under Creative CommonsCreative CommonsCreative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
licenses, and distributes the music to college radio stations, - a campaign to promote Open Access on university campuses.
Structure
Students for Free Culture began as a loose confederation of student groups on different campuses, but it has been moving towards becoming an official tax-exempt non-profit.With the passage of official bylaws, Students for Free Culture now has a clear governance structure which makes it accountable to its chapters. The supreme decision-making body is the Board of Directors, which is elected once a year by the chapters, using a Schulze method
Schulze method
The Schulze method is a voting system developed in 1997 by Markus Schulze that selects a single winner using votes that express preferences. The method can also be used to create a sorted list of winners...
for voting. It is meant to make long-term, high-level decisions, and should not meddle excessively in lower-level decisions. Practical everyday decisions will be made by the Core team, composed of any students who are members of chapters and meet the attendance requirements. Really low-level decisions and minutiae will be handled by a Coordinator, who ideally will be a paid employee of the organization, and other volunteers and assistants. A new Board of Directors was elected in February 2008, and a new Core Team was assembled shortly thereafter. There is no coordinator
Coordinator
Coordinator may refer to:*In academics: one who administers the research and teaching activities of the other professors.*Coordinators , genetically engineered humans in the Gundam SEED series...
yet.