Free Culture Swarthmore

On April 23rd, 2006, FreeCulture.org will be turning 2 years old! In celebration, we are holding a summit here at Swarthmore, where it all started. The conference will begin on the evening of Friday, April 21st, and run through the morning of Sunday, April 23rd. On Saturday night we will relax with a Pirate Parrrty, featuring remixes, eyepatches, and ARRRRR.

Peter Decherney, a professor at UPenn who is writing a book on the history of copyright law, is one of our tentative speakers. If you can come, please do, we will take care of housing (if you are a student) and food.

More details will follow soon, stay tuned!

We’re not protesting Tower Records itself as much as we’re protesting some of the products that they are selling, foisted on them by the big labels. Most of the CDs in the store do not have “copy-protection” (yet) and therefore our actions should not seriously disrupt their business, especially since we are going to be distributing information about which CDs they should specifically avoid.

As for why you should avoid CDs with “Digital Rights Managment” or “copy protection”, please take a little time to read this article: (”Firestorm rages over lockdown on digital music“, USA Today) Sony, for example, was selling CDs that infect your computer with a virus-like program that takes control of your computer, and leaves your computer vulnerable to real viruses. This resulted in a class action lawsuit (which was settled recently) and a general recall of the affected CDs. Many dangerous CDs remain on the market, however, and not all of the recalled CDs have been pulled. This is one thing that we will be checking for on Saturday while we distribute information to passers-by.

UPDATE:
One reason that we have to take the relatively extreme measure of having a protest to inform consumers about these crippled CDs is that they frequently are not clearly labeled, and there is no way for the consumer to tell ahead of time that the CD will not work as expected. Take a look at this Coldplay CD, for instance, which says “This CD can’t be burnt onto a CD or hard disc, nor can it be converted to an MP3″ and “This CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs.” Unfortunately for the consumer, it only provides this warning INSIDE the package, so that you can’t see it until you have already purchased and opened the CD. (Here’s the warning transcribed for your reading pleasure.)

It’s unreasonable to expect consumers to have x-ray vision and see inside the CD packaging to find out that this CD will not do any of the things that a normal CD ought to do.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TUESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2006

CONTACT:
Nelson Pavlosky | Free Culture Swarthmore
mobile: (973) 580-7510
nelson@freeculture.org
http://swarthmore.freeculture.org

FREE CULTURE SWARTHMORE STRIKES BACK AT DAMAGING RECORD COMPANY DRM

Following successful demonstrations by Free Culture NYU, Swarthmore Students will stand up for the rights of music consumers in a protest on February 25th at the Tower Records store on South Street.

Music consumers are suffering from restrictive “copy protection” or “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) software, digital locks placed on music CDs by record companies that are more interested in controlling what customers can do with their legally purchased music than providing an enjoyable product. Music locked down with DRM frequently cannot be copied to portable audio players or sampled for use in new creative works, and recent Sony DRM schemes have exposed their customers to computer crashes and virus attacks. Many other “copy-protected” CDs remain on the market. None effectively prevent copyright infringement, and all of them violate Compact Disc specifications and render users unable to exercise their fair use rights under US copyright law.

Free Culture co-founder and President Nelson Pavlosky said, “these sneaky DRM schemes endanger users and stop you from doing perfectly legal things like putting your music onto your iPod. It’s ridiculous; consumers don’t even know that they’re buying a broken record.”

The protest will take place Saturday, February 25th at noon at the Tower Records Store on South Street. It will continue into early afternoon. Free Culture wants to inform consumers of their fair use rights and warn them about the DRM threat.

“We need to get the word out about fair use rights,” said co-founder Luke Smith. “No one wants to buy a broken record; if you’re not allowed to put it on your iPod, what exactly are you paying for? We want record companies to replace crippled CDs and pay for the damage they cause to their customers machines. We also want to drive the message home: you can’t do this anymore, because we’re watching you.”

ABOUT – Free Culture Swarthmore is a student group at Swarthmore College, dedicated to building a world of active cultural participation and defending your digital rights. It received national media attention when its co-founders sued Diebold Election Systems for abuse of copyright law, and won a precedent-setting victory for freedom of speech and fair use. FCS became the first campus chapter of the international student organization FreeCulture.org in 2004, and is now one of over 30 chapters worldwide.

In what appears to be the first of a series, SWIL co-president and op-artist Eliza Blair relates her frustration with the MPAA’s threats to her club… in comic form! Here at Swarthmore, when we get angry, we get creative ^_^

This actually reminds me of an excellent comic about the RIAA’s attack on a network search engine at Harvey Mudd, drawn by FreeCulture.org board member Karen Rustad. The main difference is that Karen’s comic is rather more serious, to the point of sounding like free culture propaganda in parts, but it’s well worth the read. Eliza says that with this comic we shouldn’t expect a serious analysis of the issues, but we should expect some ass-kicking:

Be warned that future installments are probably going to involve more slapstick violence than actual legal savvy, as the comic Swarthmoreverse tends toward the surreal.

I’m looking forward to some surreal pwnage of the MPAA!