Free Culture Swarthmore

Last Sunday (Oct 23rd), we hosted the Free Culture Re-Mixer, which was a “mixer” for prospective students where we tried to teach them to “remix” their favorite TV shows to make their own music videos. (Yes, it’s a bad pun.) As you can see from the picture, we had an excellent turnout! I’m guessing about 30 people were there, maybe more. We began with a short talk about why the right to remix is important, and I played some examples of samples and mashups, including:

* How you remind me of someday - A Nickelback mashup which consists simply of playing two of their songs side by side, one out of the left speaker and one out of the right. Yes, they just wrote the same song twice and sold it back to you. It makes you wonder, does copyright really encourage creativity?

* A Stroke of Genius - A mashup of Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a
Bottle” with the Strokes’s “It’s Hard To Explain.” This one took some
creative thinking and good timing, but it’s still just a mashup.

* The Grey Video - A music video for the famous Grey Album, which mixes together Jay Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’s White Album. This undeniably took a great deal of talent, effort, and creativity to produce, but is still subject to the same legal difficulties that lesser remixes are subject to.

Once the talk was finished, we began trying to set up our remixing workstations, while we let the audience eat our pizza and drink our soda. Unfortunately, Rob Matthews ‘09 who actually does remixes for Fox, using their shows such as the Family Guy, was on a deadline and some of his computers were busy processing video for them. Rob uses Muvee autoProducer for Windows, which is proprietary software but is relatively inexpensive ($70?), and it makes it possible to produce a music video, with the music at least vaguely matching the video transitions, in a matter of minutes. Clearly, the power to play with and re-work the culture around us is coming within the reach of the average citizen: in this case, all you need is a laptop and some free time.

Many people left before we were able to get the computers working, but the ones who stayed were very impressed. Lesson learned: get the computers running beforehand. We’ll do a much better/faster job next time.

I just wanted to mention my latest two articles for the Swarthmore Phoenix, Business method patents hurt local stores, which is my contribution to the Cereal Solidarity campaign, and Hidden contracts, a diatribe against EULAs and the abuse thereof.

In case you’re wondering, yes, things happen at Swarthmore which are not related to my Phoenix column! We’re working on updating the website, and as soon as that’s finished, a lot more people should be posting about different stuff, hopefully ^_^

I know it’s not necessarily news every time I write a column, but as Gavin Baker at our UFlorida chapter likes to say, “If you don’t blog it, it didn’t happen!” So check out my latest article, Movie industry too strict on DVD imports, and learn how a simple martials arts movie club has difficulties with copyrights.

UPDATE: An e-mail from Tom in Madison, WI, reads:

I just read your article from a link on kungfucinema.com (the best website on martial arts film genre). Check out this [Wired News article, Film Fans Befuddled by Copyright….]

It sounds like you’re talking about a different issue than the above article, but I thought you might find it interesting anyway.

If you want to get your hands on the uncut, unedited version of the masterpiece “Fist of Legend”, go to kungfumovies.net. Search by Jet Li, then select “Fist of Legend” (DVD) (Chinese). That’s the one. Its all code (0) NTSC, original language track (Jet Li’s voice), perfect picture. The menus are in Chinese, though.

While researching my latest column in the Swarthmore Phoenix, Copyright laws impede theater, I was surprised to discover that our theater department at Swarthmore has dealt with copyright problems multiple times in the past, and that as a result the professors are well aware of the threat which excessive copyright control can pose to artistic freedom.

The extent of the Beckett estate’s control over future productions is absurd, copyright wasn’t meant to prevent reinterpretations of past works. My understanding is that, according to the Beckett estate, you cannot get creative with the casting, you have to stick to the stage directions which call for white males. Does this mean that you can’t perform “Waiting for Godot” at schools in Africa, or China? What about half-white males, or people in drag, or trans-gendered people? It’s ridiculous, and I hope that we can work with the theater department to bring awareness of the problem to our fellow students.

Our first meeting of the year will take place on Tuesday, August 30th, at 10pm in Science Center 101. This will be an introductory meeting, where we’ll explain what Free Culture Swarthmore does, and begin laying out our plans for the semester. Nelson and other founding members will talk about the history of the group, including a quick rundown of the Diebold case, and we’ll also discuss the national organization, FreeCulture.org. Please come!

In celebration of FreeCulture.org’s one year anniversary, Free Culture Swarthmore will be hosting its second annual LAN party this evening! Come on over to Science Center 199 at 7:00 PM for some intense multiplayer gaming. Dance Dance Revolution, 16-player Halo, old-school Nintendo games, gaming tournaments projected on a giant screen, LAN games–it will be an evening to remember. You can also bring your own iPod or other MP3 player and we’ll hook it up to the sound system. We will have pizza and snacks, and plenty to do for those who don’t game. If you would like to bring a computer but don’t want to carry it a quarter mile, e-mail alacey1 and he will drive it over for you. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

If you’re curious about the origin of Free Culture Swarthmore, CampusProgress.org recently ran an article about us, giving a good summary of Nelson and Luke’s epic battle against Diebold (unfortunately mis-titling us Swarthmore Free Culture — but they can be forgiven; several other Free Culture chapters are similarly titled). The whole Diebold hubbub has died down a bit by now though, and most freshmen — myself included — don’t see Free Culture Swarthmore as Those Guys Who Sued Diebold. In fact, the biggest debate we’ve had recently was trying to identify exactly who we are and what we represent. Everyone who is in the group knows what “free culture” is, and what Free Culture is, but each person’s ideas are a little different from the next, and trying to articulate those ideas has proven surprisingly difficult.
What makes identifying what we do and who we are so hard? Perhaps the biggest obstacle is that there is no commonly accepted jargon for talking about the things that we are interested in. If you walked up to someone on the street and asked her what she thought about protecting the info-commons, she’d probably think you were insane. Before a jargon evolves and is accepted, however, there needs to be a general understanding of the issues, and without a way to identify those issues quickly and effectively, people lose interest. Thus our greatest challenge is trying to bring important issues (such as the Diebold thing) to the attention of the public despite this language barrier.

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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