History

A word from our founders

The Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons was the product of our freshman year idealism. We lamented the lack of an organization to spread the ideals of the open source / Free Software movement to other kinds of so-called "intellectual property." In that oh-so-liberal-arts moment, we resolved to start one ourselves. It was not easy going, that year. It was already the middle of the spring semester, and few people came to our largely incoherent meetings. Worse, they weren’t the right people — they had no committment to the cause; they were more interested than involved. The school year ended, and that was that.

Looking back, a big part of our failure that year was a failure to think big. No one wants to help you organize something mediocre. The way to attract people is by having big but concrete organizational goals.

Anyhow, we resolved to do better next year, and we did. We hit early in the semester and lured freshmen to our meetings with pizza that we paid for out-of-pocket. We found a few good people, and had weekly meetings. Lawrence Lessig’s original Free Culture flash presentation was well-received and got good coverage in the school newspaper. We still had coherence issues, and we lacked a charter, but we had energy… it was during that time that we wrote the first version of the manifesto.

Then, out of nowhere, an exciting but frightening opportunity fell out of the sky. Our friends at Why War? were hosting the so-called Diebold memos — an e-mail archive that revealed flaws in the voting machines manufactured by that company. Before long we found ourselves the target of one of the infamous DMCA takedown notices. We were unprepared for so much, so fast; those were frantic days and nights, filled with secret phone calls to lawyers, intense strategizing, and above all, raw terror. With the help of our friend Branen Salmon, we found pro bono representation at the EFF and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Suddenly, we were bringing a federal lawsuit against a nearly $2 billion corporation. We assumed that a countersuit was inevitable.

In the meantime, Micah White and Why War? were spreading the Archive to colleges all over the country. More than 100 hosts risked liability by putting the e-mail archive online. For quite some time, Diebold continued to fire off takedown letters to every school that hosted the memos.

It wasn’t long before the press began to take notice of our situation, although most were interested as a result of the growing controversy surrounding Diebold’s machines and Direct Recording Electronic machines generally. Even so, one article in the New York Times was titled "File Sharing Pits Copyright against Free Speech," which featured our overly dramatic photograph.

Though the case was certainly a lot of fun, it didn’t help us any great deal with campus organizing. People knew our name and more about our cause, but there was little they could do to help out. After the initial excitement of the case faded and Diebold backed down, we tried a few other things on campus: first, we had a LAN party, which was a raging success; second, we convinced Prof. Lessig to come speak at the College. He was brilliant, as always, delivering an inspiring speech to a packed house. It was at his talk that we officially launched the website for FreeCulture.org, our proposed international student organization for free culture.

Soon, the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons was only one of many free culture student groups on campuses around the country (soon to be one of many around the world), and we changed the name to Free Culture Swarthmore to reflect its new role as a part of a greater student movement. Today Free Culture Swarthmore remains a leader in the student movement, which is appropriate for the birthplace of FreeCulture.org. Join us, and ride the shockwave of an explosively expanding activist community, which deals with bleeding-edge issues at the forefront of law, technology, society, and culture.

-- Co-founders Luke Smith '06 and Nelson Pavlosky '06