Students for Free Culture

FreeCulture.org is an international student organization working to promote free culture ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.

According to its website, FreeCulture.org has four main functions:

• 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 rights management, and trusted computing, inspired largely by the Free Software Foundation. After watching Lawrence Lessig's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture", 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.

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.

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. 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 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, in an event at Swarthmore College featuring Lawrence Lessig as the keynote speaker (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.

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.

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.

The NYU chapter made headlines when it began protesting outside of record stores against DRM on CDs during the Sony rootkit scandal, resulting in similar protests around New York and Philadelphia. 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, and the first protest was on October 27, 2005 .

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.

External links

• Official homepage