2006-09-11

Webcomics Symposium
22nd--24th, weekend from this Friday

Money--pending, FFS will get back to us by this Thursday, we should be fine as long as they give us 1500, we have matching funds from President's Office--Eric will file an amended proposal asking for some extra money for food for the speakers--we ask for forty each.

Housing-- we have three rooms for them to stay, we will need to hire cabs from the airport for them, but Eric should be reserving them within the week

Schedule
Friday, a general panel discussion starting at 7 PM, primary focus should be on webcomics as a business, we were thinking of starting at seven and giving each person ~10 minutes to talk before we go into moderated panel--Burke could be the moderator, Lauren will ask him tomorrow-- ~30 minutes of moderated panel, ~30 minutes of Q&A, several minutes of padding, we will end it at 9:30

Saturday, we want to be more workshop oriented: we have Sci 199 from 12 to 9, but we might want to add small classrooms? We have two confirmed workshops from Tayler, one from Order of the Stick, and one from Websnark and Shannon Garrity. We haven't heard from other people yet--we should plan for four to five workshops, so we will be there from 1 to 6 PM, although we should target 5:30.

We should volunteer to sell things for them at a table somewhere in the back of the room after their workshops.

We will also bring them water and some food, but not meals--we need to find them breakfast--Eric will be asking for more money to cover these expenses.

Eric is also sending out e-mails to the artists seeing what their workshop title and preferred time/length is, and also asking for advertising help in the form of high-resolution art samples.

Advertising
Miles will take care of the Gazette stuff--Eric will take care of the Phoenix advertisement--Lauren will take care of the PR department, which will presumably take care of the Weekly News--Alex will contact Rebekah at Bryn Mawr/Haverford--Herbert will look into advertising in the Penn, Drexel, and Temple papers--Miles will take care of BoingBoing--Nick will blog on our FreeCulture.org blog--Alex will try posting to various blogs and things--Eric will make sure posters get designed--Alex will create a Facebook event and invite all of us.

Other Projects

 * Copynight in downtown Philly (Fourth Tuesday of each month, 8 PM)
 * Interaction with other Philly groups
 * Keeping our blog clean and UPDATED

What do we stand for?
(These minutes are highly freeform. Please add.)

Eric handed out flyers with three issues--What should be copyrighted, How long should the term last, and how should copyright be enforced?--what do we care about most and what can we do to promote our stances?

Eric A. and Miles point out that many of these questions overlap, and that the DMCA crosses all issues to become, really, the main issue.

The right to build on the ideas of others.

Nelson was very much about creating a grassroots bottom-up society and going beyond just the copyright issue--we want to encourage greater participation in the authoring of our culture.

We can be opposed to corporate ownership of our culture, but not to corporations in general? So many questions.

We decided to break our goals into the "mundane" and the idealistic:

"Mundane" Goals

 * Revise the patenting process
 * Specifically, simplify the process.
 * Reduce cost - partially addressed by adopting "first-to-file" law
 * Define what is patentable, and how.
 * Which categories of things are patentable?
 * How novel does something need to be to be patented?
 * Should a collaborative (wiki-style) approach be taken to parts of the process?
 * How do we define the term "obvious" when it comes to whether something can be patented?
 * Copyright revisions
 * Shorten current copyright terms, and discourage the further extension of copyrights
 * Revise the DMCA
 * Particularly the parts that do not admit other legal protections (fair use, for example)

Idealistic Goals

 * Encourage a broader cultural participation/authorship
 * A grassroots-powered culture, not just corporation-oriented
 * Oppose corporate ownership of most of our culture

TO-DO
See Webcomics Symposium section. Alex, send out an e-mail continuing this copyright discussion to Core. Consider moving the meeting somewhere like New Dorm...