About

The genesis of the Free Culture movement lies in Lawrence Lessig's book of the same name, which defined intellectual property reform as a social and cultural issue as well as a legal and commercial one. This position has been taken by organizations like the EFF, the Free Software Foundation and others, but the movement had no real presence in campus activism groups until 2004, when Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith created the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons.

Though we started small, we quickly gained publicity when we involved ourselves in the Diebold controversy. Though the Diebold memos raised important questions about the integrity of electronic voting systems, it also raised the important -- and often missed -- issue that Diebold's malfeasance was only uncovered thanks to those who distributed and publicized the Diebold memos online, in the face of legal threats from Diebold using the DMCA to force people to take them down.

The Diebold drama underscored, for us, what we're all about -- the fact that people undertaking an entirely noble project for the public good can be stymied by ill-thought-out, overly broad intellectual property laws that have been twisted far away from their original purpose. We're in a bad place when whistleblowers who would expose company corruption can be stopped by that company's high-handed invocation of their "intellectual property rights" over the evidence of that corruption, and we were proud to be one of the organizations that stood up to Diebold's threats, countersued them and overturned their attempts to cover up their wrongdoing.

But we're not a one-trick pony. We used the publicity from the Diebold case to disseminate our message, and soon spawned other campus groups at other colleges. We created the website FreeCulture.org to act as a hub for our nationwide efforts to get out the word about intellectual property reform and to oppose the most pressing threats to free culture in the world today as well as spreading the word about exciting ways the free culture ethic is changing our world.

SCDC, now known as Free Culture Swarthmore, remains the flagship organization of the campus Free Culture movement, but many students from all our member organizations have taken on leadership roles as part of our core team. If your school is one of the ones that already has a Free Culture organization, contact your local FC.org branch and learn how you can get involved. If not, ask us how you can get a FC.org branch started at your school.