Free Culture Swarthmore

Here are the minutes from last Thursday’s meeting. It seemed like a good
time. We’ll meet this Thursday at 9:30pm in Kohlberg also. I’ll try to
bring food again (I promise better baked goods). If you can’t make this
time, please email me.

This meeting was a general introductory one. Nick and I talked about FC
philosophy and plans in general. We went over our current projects (Music,
FC Labs, Tor, Films, etc.). Below I’ve just summarized the “new” stuff we
talked about.

1. Michener

I met with VP Eldridge about the Michener copyright. We’re on track to
publish a novel of our choice under CreativeCommons (probably a BY-NC
license). I’m currently deciding which novel. Feel free to suggest one
(South Pacific is not eligible).

2. ITS

I am meeting with the new ITS director this week. This will be a general
conversation about FC ideals and how we want to work with ITS. If you have
anything you’d like me to bring up, email me. I’m not going to hound her
about very specific things. I just want to introduce us.

3. Elections

We voted in the national Elections. Nick and I ran for the
board of directors. As approved by the rest of FC, we voted for ourselves. Neither of us ended up winning a position.

It was great to see freshmen at Monday night’s meeting. Next Thursday, 1/31 @ 9:30pm in Kohlberg Coffee Bar we will have our next meeting. The purpose of this meeting will be to introduce Free Culture to anyone interested (both students and faculty!). We’ll be putting up flyers, etc. We’ll also have chocolate/peanut-butter cookies that are really good.

Minutes for 1/21

1. Music

FreeCulture has been recording student and independent bands for a year now. We put out a great compilation CD (free to the student body) last semester, and we hope to put at least one more out this semester, but higher quality and with more support.

We’ll also be making available the hundreds of recordings we have on a digital media server.

If you have any interest in helping out — with recording, playing, artwork, CD production, etc. — email me (bmazer1).

2. James Michener (the famous author of long books) left his copyrights to Swarthmore when he died. Previous FC members worked to have one of his books released under CreativeCommons. We are going to be making sure this project is completed.

3. We will be showing various films related to copyright (documentaries such as “Good Copy, Bad Copy” and “Steal This Film”, and some public domain movies such as “Charade”) this semester, hopefully in collaboration with the Film Dept.

4. TurnItIn.com is used by some departments on campus. Its required use in a class represents a violation of students’ intellectual property rights and is ideological against what both Free Culture and modern academia stand for. We are discussing whether or not is productive to pursue a fight against this policy.

5. Beginning last semester we’ve been working on bringing Tor — an internet anonymizing program — to Swarthmore. If implemented and used, it effectively protects the identity of an individual user within the network. It would help provide our students with a defense against the RIAA’s unsubstantiated legal attacks.

6. Nick has been running periodic hack-a-thons, targeting the Comp. Sci. elements of the school to encourage participation in open source software.

7. Nick is also considering starting a Linux Users Group (LUG) to help students install and manage the linux operating system.

8. We are voting for the Students for Free Culture national board of directors.