Free Culture Swarthmore

Free Culture Swarthmore is hosting a webcomics symposium this upcoming Friday September 22nd and Saturday the 23rd, focusing on artists who make a living by giving their art away for free. Our guests include Howard Tayler (of Schlock Mercenary), Shaenon Garrity (of Narbonic, Smithson, and Li’l Mell), Rich Burlew (of Order of the Stick), and both Eric Burns and Wednesday White (the authors behind Websnark).

The purpose behind this symposium is to explore the new business of creativity in the digital age. When costs of distribution are insignificant, what kind of new creations and business models are made possible? Webcomics have led this exploration for years, since advertisements first started making their way onto the websites of online comics. On Friday, we will hold a full discussion panel starting at 7 PM, which will explore these questions — and leave plenty of time for a question-and-answer session afterwards.

On Saturday, we’ll break out of this model; starting at 1 PM, our guest artists will have the opportunity to host their own workshops on topics of their interest, from writing to running a business, and from drawing a comic to world-building.

Events will be held in the Swarthmore College Science Center, Room 199 (Cunniff Hall). We hope to see you there!

Apparently the smiley face is copyrighted. And that makes Wal-Mart feel unhappy. Or perhaps .

The University of Pennsylvania is getting a free culture chapter! Rebekah Baglini from Bryn Mawr and myself attended Penn Free Culture’s first meeting yesterday, to show regional support. They have a lot of exciting plans for the next year, including opposing the university’s proposed adoption of Ruckus, a DRM-crippled Windows-only music service, and supporting open access publishing. I also have hopes that they will get a Copynight going in Philadelphia… it’s truly a travesty that Pittsburgh has a Copynight but Philadelphia doesn’t This is one of many exciting developments to come out of the national summit that we had a couple weeks ago… I have every expectation that they will have a thriving chapter come fall!

technorati tags: upenn, meetings

Join us this Thursday night 9-10:30pm at 7pm in Science Center 181 and learn how to make your own music videos from footage of popular TV shows and movies and the music of your choice! Whether you are a prospective student or the host of a prospective student, please do come and learn about remixing and why it is important to the future of creativity.

The Free Culture Summit schedule has been finalized. Now you can find out all the exciting things we’ll be doing at the summit, which is being held Friday, April 21st through Sunday, April 23rd, here at Swarthmore College. We already have over 50 attendees signed up, and we are anticipating around 80 people. Our lineup of speakers includes Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge; Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle; and Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture. Read the entire schedule here.

Tomorrow on Tuesday, April 4th at 7pm in Sci 183, Brad Guigar of Evil Inc. will speak about his experiences as a webcomic artist and a member of the Blank Label webcomics collective. Whether you’re interested in the business side or artistic side of web comics, this is definitely worth attending.

Are you surprised that we would associate with an entity known as Evil, Inc.? “Isn’t Free Culture supposed to support good things, not evil things?”, you may ask. Don’t worry, Brad himself is not evil, but if you aren’t willing to take our word for it, you’ll just have to come and evaluate his moral worth yourself

Blizzard tries to stop someone from selling an unofficial game guide.

Is this a legitimate derivative work?
Or is it infringing upon copyright?

(and why is Blizzard suing under the DMCA?)

We will be screening Star Wars Revelations at 10pm on Friday, March 24th, in Science Center 101. Why? Because it’s a fan-produced film that is arguably better than George Lucas’s last three attempts, despite only having a budget of $20,000. Its special effects were produced in an open-source collaborative model, by a “scattered group of artists around the world, working on different platforms and pieced together in post-production.” It was distributed entirely through the internet.

Perhaps most importantly, we can show it to as many people as we want without getting a nasty-gram from the MPAA, unlike many mainstream movies on this campus. How cool is that?

Since Star Wars: Revelations itself is only 47 minutes long, we may also show other Star Wars videos, including some Star Wars Kid remixes (apologies to the poor kid), “Troops” - a Cops parody, the “trailer” for “American Jedi,” and perhaps Pizza Delivery Jedi, a film produced by Florida Free Culture member J.C. Jones. Long live fanfic!

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.