Free Culture Swarthmore

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.

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!

Last weekend I took a trip to Haverford with some friends to see the World/Inferno Friendship Society, described by allmusic.com as “a rotating cabaret of punk/ska/gospel featuring horns, piano, punk rock guitar, a number of percussionists, and a mayhem-inducing live presence.” Emphasis on the mayhem-inducing… I have never seen a crowd go quite that beserk at a show before! Not only were there people crowdsurfing, there were people hanging from the pipes on the ceiling, including the lead singer at one point. The music was excellent, the band had incredible energy and stage presence, and they rocked hard enough to more than justify the ecstatic audience.

At some point Free Culture member Alex Benn showed up with the Creative Commons media kit which I had forgotten to bring, so that I could catch the band after the show to deliver it. I purchased the band’s latest CD “Just The Best Party” from their booth before approaching them, figuring that I should make a fair trade, taking some of their stuff before giving them mine. I then strode up onto the stage where the musicians were breaking down their equipment, congratulating them on the show and asking about their next CD. Then I led into the key question: “So how do you guys feel about filesharing?” They looked at each other and said “Steal it… steal everything!” I knew then that they could be receptive to Creative Common’s message of flexible copyright, and handed them the media kit, telling them that they should give the fans clear permission to share if they’re OK with people trading their music.

I don’t know if they’ll actually read the flyer, listen to the CD, or watch the DVD, but they seemed very friendly and interested. I suppose the key question is what happened to the kit after I walked away… did it disappear into someone’s bag, never to emerge again? Or did someone take it home and examine it? (Maybe we need some goodies that would motivate them to open the package… perhaps Creative Commons chocolate!) Either way, the concert was a great experience, but I do hope that I helped W/IFS take some baby steps towards freedom that night.

Two excellent articles on the MPAA threats to clubs that show movies on campus came out this week, with the Daily Gazette reporting Campus movie screenings in limbo and the Phoenix declaring Movie showings may be illegal. Unfortunately, I missed the meeting with the deans, but Free Culture Swarthmore will continue to be involved in this process.

It seems to me that one key legal question is what matters to the public performance classification: the number of people that you invite, or the number of people who actually attend? For many of our movie groups, the entire campus of 1400 people is invited, but only 5-10 people show up each week. It may prove difficult for them to justify a budget for licensing fees if they don’t have high attendance.

If what matters is how many people you invite, it seems to me that our movie groups may have to do three things that they do not want to do, in order to avoid the “public performance” classification and licensing fees:

(1) Stop accepting college funds to buy/rent their movies, because if they do they have to make the event open to everyone on campus.
(2) Stop advertising to the campus, which will reduce the number of people who show up even further.
(3) Move from the nice classrooms and lecture halls on campus to TVs in dorm lounges, because you have to reserve space in order to use classrooms, and reserving space makes your reservation appear online and counts as advertising.

However, I’m not sure that the “number of people you invite” standard makes sense…. you may invite many more people to your private party than the number you expect to actually intend. You may even post a general invitation on your blog, as I did for my last house party. Are you then forced to get a public performance license when only 10 people show up to your house party, as expected? The key difference there, of course, is that your private party is supposed to be composed of your friends. However, it may be more like friends of friends, or social acquaintances, or people who were randomly passing through… I’m not completely convinced there is a qualitative difference. Oh well, I’ll try to research it some more.