Free Culture Swarthmore

Ever wondered how much worse the penalty is for stealing a DVD than for downloading it? You might have seen this article if you read Slashdot regularly, but if not, you might be surprised at the answer: apparently the penalty for downloading a season of the popular TV show Alias could be as much as 33 times as much as that for stealing a physical DVD. What does this say about our priorities as a society?

Are we willing to say that stealing something from a brick-and-mortar store is much worse than sharing a show that anyone can watch for free on network television? This demonstrates just how out of control copyright law has become, and why people need to learn about these issues. Many artists, such as those who distribute their music under a Creative Commons license on sites like Opsound, would be pretty angry if somebody stole physical CDs of theirs, but don’t mind people downloading their music (or other artistic work).

To play off of Opsound’s Attribution-ShareAlike CC license, which allows for commercial use, we’re planning to sell some CDs of Opsound music as a fundraiser at the Swarthmore charity fair in April (the site sadly seems to be broken at the moment). Selling these CDs doesn’t hurt the market for Opsound’s music: in fact, we’ll bringing their music to an entirely new audience, the families that live in the town of Swarthmore and who probably would never hear of Opsound without our help. If only the major labels were as enlightened as the artists at Opsound.

Please come to our showing of Eyes on the Prize! It’ll be taking place Tuesday, Feb 8th, at 10pm in Science Center 101. There will be free food! Below is our press release, which we’ll be sending to various news sources: (more…)

Every year here at Swarthmore, our local environmentalist group, Earthlust, “storms the dorms.” They basically go to door in the dorms and tell people what they can do to reduce energy usage (as reducing energy usage on campus is their current project). We thought that this would be a great model for Free Culture Swarthmore to emulate. It just so happened that some of our friends in the IT department (specifcially Marc Richards, who rocks) were working (unofficially) on promoting Firefox use on campus. They had installed Firefox on all of the public area Windows computers and Macs, they had made ginormous banners and posted them around campus, and they had created a local Firefox download site complete with FAQs and a help forum (the site is only accessible from on campus, my apologies to visitors). So we decided to help them out, and storm the dorms to help people install Firefox on their computers!

First we made some flyers to hand out to people, telling people what Firefox is, how they can get help using it, and why we care about Firefox. Then we made CDs with the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox on them to help our dorm storming teams. Finally, we divided into teams and covered each dorm, from top to bottom!

Below are the reports from some of our dorm teams. Overall, I think the event was a success!
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