 FreeCulture.org's "bricks" logo, inspired by Lessig's statement that "creativity always builds upon the past". FreeCulture.org is dedicated to preserving the freedom to make new things, and that means the fundamental building blocks of culture must remain available for everybody to use. FreeCulture.org is an international student organization working to promote free culture ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig (who wrote the book Free Culture) and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. FreeCulture.org has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world[1], and a history of grassroots activism. Image File history File links Free_Culture_dot_org_logo. ...
Image File history File links Free_Culture_dot_org_logo. ...
The book cover Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1. ...
Lawrence Lessig Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic. ...
The book cover Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1. ...
NGO is an abbreviation or code for: Non-governmental organization Nagoya Airport (IATA code) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ...
EFF Logo The EFF uses the blue ribbon as symbolism for their Free Speech defense. ...
Public Knowledge is a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that is involved in intellectual property law, competition, and choice in the digital marketplace, and an open standards/end-to-end Internet. ...
FreeCulture.org is sometimes referred to as "FreeCulture", "the Free Culture Movement", and other variations on the "free culture" theme, but it was incorporated as "FreeCulture.org, Inc."[2] and FreeCulture.org is in fact its official name.
Goals
FreeCulture.org has stated its goals in a "manifesto": The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.[3] It has yet to publish a more "official" mission statement, but some of its goals are: - decentralization of creativity -- getting ordinary people and communities involved with art, science, journalism and other creative industries, especially through new technologies
- reforming copyright, patent, and trademark law in the public interest, ensuring that new creators are not stifled by old creators
- making important information available to the public
Purpose According to its website[4], FreeCulture.org has four main functions within the free culture movement: - Creating and providing resources for its chapters and for the general public
- Outreach to youth and students
- Networking with other people, companies and organizations in the free culture movement
- Issue advocacy on behalf of its members
History
Initial stirrings at Swarthmore College FreeCulture.org had its origins in the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (now Free Culture Swarthmore), a student group at Swarthmore College which would eventually become the first FreeCulture.org chapter. The SCDC was founded in 2003 by students Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky, and was originally focused on issues related to free software, digital restrictions management, and treacherous computing, inspired largely by the Free Software Foundation.[5] After watching Lawrence Lessig's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture"[6], however, they expanded the club's scope to cover cultural participation in general (rather than just in the world of software and computers), and began tackling issues such as copyright reform. Free Culture Swarthmore is a student group at Swarthmore College and the founding chapter of FreeCulture. ...
Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1450 students. ...
This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ...
Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified by the vendor. ...
...
The Free Software Foundation logo The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organization founded in October 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project. ...
Lawrence Lessig Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic. ...
The OPG v. Diebold case Within a couple of months of founding the SCDC, Smith and Pavlosky became embroiled in the controversy surrounding Diebold Election Systems, a voting machine manufacturer accused of making bug-ridden and insecure electronic voting machines. The SCDC had been concerned about electronic voting machines using proprietary software rather than open source software, and kept an eye on the situation. Their alarm grew when a copy of Diebold's internal e-mail archives leaked onto the internet, revealing questionable practices at Diebold and possible flaws with Diebold's machines, and they were spurred into action when Diebold began sending legal threats to voting activists who posted the e-mails on their websites. Diebold was claiming that the e-mails were their copyrighted material, and that anyone who posted these e-mails online was infringing upon their intellectual property. The SCDC posted the e-mail archive on its website and prepared for the inevitable legal threats. Diebold Elections Systems is a subsidiary of Diebold that makes and sells voting machines. ...
Sure enough, Diebold sent takedown notices under the DMCA to the SCDC's ISP, Swarthmore College. Swarthmore took down the SCDC website, and the SCDC co-founders sought legal representation.[7] They contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation for help, and discovered that they had an opportunity to sign on to an existing lawsuit against Diebold, OPG v. Diebold, with co-plaintiffs from a non-profit ISP called the Online Policy Group who had also received legal threats from Diebold. With pro bono legal representation from EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic, they sued Diebold for abusing copyright law to suppress freedom of speech online. After a year of legal battles, the judge ruled that posting the e-mails online was a fair use, and that Diebold had violated the DMCA by misrepresenting their copyright claims over the e-mails. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial United States copyright law which criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. ...
An Internet service provider (abbr. ...
EFF Logo The EFF uses the blue ribbon as symbolism for their Free Speech defense. ...
OPG v. ...
OPG v. ...
The Center for Internet and Society is a project founded by Lawrence Lessig at Stanford Law School. ...
For fair use in trademark law, see Fair use (US trademark law). ...
The network of contacts that Smith and Pavlosky built during the lawsuit, including dozens of students around the country who had also hosted the Diebold memos on their websites, gave them momentum they needed to found an international student movement based on the same free culture principles as the SCDC. They purchased the domain name http://freeculture.org and began building a website, while contacting student activists at other schools who could help them start the organization.
FreeCulture.org launches at Swarthmore On April 23rd, 2004, Smith and Pavlosky announced the official launch of FreeCulture.org[8], in an event at Swarthmore College featuring Lawrence Lessig as the keynote speaker[9][10] (Lessig had released his book Free Culture less than a month beforehand.) The SCDC became the first Freeculture.org chapter (beginning the process of changing its name to Free Culture Swarthmore), and students from other schools in the area who attended the launch went on to found chapters on their campuses, including Bryn Mawr College and Franklin and Marshall.[11] The book cover Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1. ...
Bryn Mawr is also the name of an official neighborhood of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. ...
Franklin and Marshall College is a four-year private co-educational liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ...
Internet campaigns FreeCulture.org began by launching a number of internet campaigns, in an attempt to raise its profile and bring itself to the attention of college students. These have covered issues ranging from defending artistic freedom (Barbie in a Blender) to fighting the Induce Act (Save The iPod), from celebrating Creative Commons licenses and the public domain (Undead Art) to opposing business method patents (Cereal Solidarity). While these one-shot websites succeeded in attracting attention from the press and encouraged students to get involved, they didn't directly help the local chapters, and the organization now concentrates less on web campaigns than it did in the past. However, their recent Down With DRM video contest was a successful "viral video" campaign against DRM, and internet campaigns remain an important tool in free culture activism. The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, often abbreviated to just INDUCE Act, is a bill introduced in the United States Senate which targets who[m]ever intentionally induces any violation of copyright. ...
Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ...
The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...
Business method patents are a class of patents and one of many legal aspects of business. ...
An increased emphasis on local chapters Today the organization focuses on providing services to its local campus chapters, including web services such as mailing lists and wikis, pamphlets and materials for tabling, and organizing conferences where chapter members can meet up. Active chapters are located at schools such as NYU, Harvard, University of Florida, Swarthmore, USC, and Emory. New York University (NYU) is a large research-oriented university in New York City, and is among the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the United States. ...
Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...
The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university located in Gainesville, Florida. ...
Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1450 students. ...
The University of Southern California (commonly referred to as USC, SC, Southern California, and Southern Cal[1]), located in the downtown district of Los Angeles, California, USA, was founded in 1880, making it Californias oldest private research university. ...
Emory University is a private university in the city of Atlanta, Georgia. ...
The NYU chapter made headlines when it began protesting outside of record stores against DRM on CDs during the Sony rootkit scandal, [12] resulting in similar protests around New York and Philadelphia[13]. These protests may have served as inspiration for the FSF's Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign, since Richard Stallman attended the second protest in November 2005[14], and the first protest was on October 27, 2005 [15][16]. New York University (NYU) is a large research-oriented university in New York City, and is among the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the United States. ...
XCP-Aurora Extended Copy Protection (XCP) is a software package developed by the British company First 4 Internet and sold as a copy protection or digital rights management (DRM) scheme for compact discs. ...
Defective by Design is a anti-DRM initiative by Free Software Foundation. ...
Richard Matthew Stallman (nickname rms) (born March 16, 1953) is both an acclaimed software freedom activist and software developer. ...
Other recent activities at local chapters include:
- art shows featuring Creative Commons-licensed art[17][18],
- mix CD-exchanging flash mobs [19],
- film-remixing contests [20][21],
- and iPod liberating parties, where the organizers help people replace the proprietary DRM-crippled operating system on their iPods with an open source system like Rockbox. [22]
- Antenna Alliance, a project that provides free recording space to bands, releases their music online under Creative Commons licenses, and distributes the music to college radio stations.[23]
Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ...
The compact audio cassette brought homemade mixes of pop songs within the reach of the casual music fan. ...
A flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual or notable, and then disperse. ...
A remix is an alternate mix of a song different from the original version, made using the techniques of audio editing. ...
A white fifth generation iPod with a sleeve and earphones. ...
Rockbox is a free software / open source operating system for digital audio players (DAPs). ...
Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ...
Structure FreeCulture.org began as a loose confederation of student groups on different campuses, but it has been moving towards becoming an official tax-exempt non-profit, and towards making relationships with its chapters more "official" and meaningful.
References
External links - Official homepage
- Blog posts about FreeCulture.org in the media
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