The details again:

Asheesh Laroia and Parker Phinney from OpenHatch.org
8pm, Monday, March 22
Kimmel 904

There will be a Q&A session after the screening with Mr. McCleod and the legendary remixer Steve “Steinski” Stein.

Once more with the details:
Free public screening of Copyright Criminals by Kembrew McCleod, with Q&A with McCleod and Steinski
7pm, Friday, March 5
Warren Weaver Hall, rm 109
251 Mercer Street (at 4th)

And for more information about the film: http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/

Hope to see you all there!

To everyone we met there — it was wonderful meeting you!

We’re at Free Culture X right now! If you’re not with us and interested in following what’s going on, check out these resources (other than our website, of course):

http://twitter.com/fcnyu
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23fcx
http://conference.freeculture.org/live/

Also check our Flickr for photos!

Eben Moglen

It’s taking place this Friday, February 5, from 7-9pm in room 109 of Warren Weaver Hall (251 Mercer Street, on the eastern side of Gould Plaza). In case you DO have to miss it, the whole thing will be streamed live on LiveStream.

Thanks to ISOC-NY for putting together this whole shebang and bringing Eben to NYU!

Free Culture X Conference in Washington D.C., Feb 13-14. Pay what you want: http://bit.ly/fcconf #fcx

Free Culture X, a conference of Students for Free Culture, will be held February 13/14th at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Keynote addresses will be given by Harvard Berkman Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the public interest group Public Knowledge, Gigi Sohn, and the director of American University’s Center for Social Media, Pat Aufderheide.

The conference is focused on developing greater openness among institutions of higher education by specifically investigating:

• The politics of open networks
• Global access to knowledge
• Free software
• Open education

Registration is pay-what-you-want, whether that’s $1 or $100. All proceeds will go directly to help projects of Students for Free Culture. The average registration is currently about $25. Gifts (such as signed copies of books by Lawrence Lessig and Henry Jenkins or custom voicemail recordings by Jonathan Zittrain) are awarded for bigger donations. Register now: http://conference.freeculture.org/register/

Hope to see you guys there!

The free culture movement seeks:

• To advocate for copyright reform. Copyright was initially an esoteric and rarely used right by commercial publishers. It now applies automatically to any minimally creative original work for the author’s life plus 70 years. In a culture where people are constantly referencing each other and past works, this legal monopoly creates an enormous amount of friction when creating new works. How can authors be sure that their new work isn’t somehow infringing on past works? Many contemporary musicians and artists are frequently discouraged from creating new works by the threat of a hypothetical career-destroying lawsuit. Fair use is a difficult and expensive counterweight to the broad and diverse rights granted by copyright and is not a long term viable solution.
• To advocate for access to culture through technology and the Internet. Technology has given us the tools to share and spread culture easily, cheaply, and massively. We should be embracing this opportunity in every way possible. The Free Culture movement actively supports efforts like Wikipedia, Creative Commons and Linux as projects that advance this goal.
• To actively support artists and creators who are interested in pursuing and creating free culture. There are already hundreds of millions objects released under Creative Commons, licensed under the GPL and in the public domain. Creators that actively pursue careers in creating free culture and supporting themselves through other means are the most likely to survive and we should acknowledge and support them now.
• To seriously re-examine long established modes of publication and production. Incumbent media industries have a habit of sticking to their tried and true methods. For example, the fight between sheet musicians and the budding recording industry, the fight between recorded musicians and radio, the fight between the movie industry and the home video industry are all examples of where media incumbents fought viciously and unsuccessfully to destroy innovative new media from eating their lunch. The Free Culture movement actively antagonizes nostalgia for old formats and modes of distribution in favor of discovering new modes of production, business, and creation. We’re not sure what the future will hold for sustainable creative development, but we do know clinging to outdated metaphors and business models will fail as it has in the past.
• To continue the previous point: To actively fight against technologies like DRM that “nostalgize” media. Digital media functions differently from physical media and we need to seriously re-examine how we understand ideas like ownership and use. Free culture is about leveraging the potential scale of digital media, not fighting it.
• To actively support licensing and legal frameworks that encourage free culture. The GNU GPL license is one example as it enables software programmers to mandate freedom to use and share and learn from their work. Creative Commons is another one that applies to other cultural works like photos, music, and film. These licenses represent best-efforts at reforming copyright law from the outside. As more and more creators decide to release their work freely, the more the public can benefit from a pool of free culture.
• To support efforts at defining and enforcing net neutrality — Whether through market forces or regulation, enforcing net neutrality will continue to be fundamental in precipitating a free culture. If content creators cannot be sure that their work can traverse the Internet unfettered and for minimal cost, then they have less incentive to create free culture. Similarly, if the Internet becomes a variant of premium subscription television with corporately curated content constantly receiving priority over other types of content (Like Wikipedia or Creative Commons licensed music) then it will be less likely that we’ll see free culture.
• To support efforts in preserve user anonymity, privacy and autonomy. Free Culture will thrive through the use encryption and good data and privacy retention policies. Users are generating massive amounts of data about themselves and their friends online. Where does this data go? How is it used? What rights do users to have to their own data created on the sites they use? Free culture attempts to answer these questions in favor of the individual rather than the corporation. On some level these are consumer rights questions, but on another level they are human rights questions. When the majority of the planet frequently uses the Internet to communicate to one another, how do we properly police the use of their communications? These are difficult questions to answer and the Free Culture movement doesn’t intend to answer all of them, but we are interested in encouraging a rational and progressive discussion about them.

Want more? Read our (possibly dated) manifesto here.

BRB.

NYU’s very own Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, New York University, will be speaking at Columbia this Thursday at noon. Gabriella is a talented scholar and friend. This is a great opportunity to see her speak. Details below.

  VS.  

Thursday November 13: noon – 2:00pm
Columbia University Communications Colloquium
270B IAB (International Affairs Building:
http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/tour/11.html
http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/calendar/

In this talk I present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as ?Internet vs Scientology,? which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of ?Project Chanology,? which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine the culturally antipodal relationship between Scientology and hacker/geek culture. In so doing I will demonstrate how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in unexpected ways in the context of these battles and I will use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today.

Technorati Tags: anon, hackers, GabriellaColeman, Scientology

Released in December 2007 by the League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others), Steal This Film 2 tries to go beyond the current discussions around file-sharing to look at what kinds of social change are precipitated by massive changes in our capacity to communicate. The film argues that the changes wrought by networked, peer distribution are historical on the scale of the printing press and tries to explain why.

For many of you these argument will be familiar. These are strange times, in which to many of us the battle already seems to have been won. Yet governments continue to enact harsh laws expanding the scope of copyright protection and increasing sanctions for its infringement, lawsuits are levied against filesharers, fines imposed and arrests made – all intended to destroy or delay what is an inevitable change in how we look at creative work.

At the same time there has developed a burgeoning area of cultural production outside of both the institution of copyright and the historical channels of distribution, be they television, cinema or music stores. Deep beneath the sand the playing field of culture is shifting, in no small part due to the combined actions of millions of peer produsers.

Alan Toner, one of the peers responsible for the film’s production, will be present for a discussion afterwards, during which there will
also be a demonstration of STF’s footage archive.

http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/
http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/
http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film

Sunday, November 16, 2008
7:00pm – 9:00pm

Room 109 Warren Weaver Hall
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY

RSVP on Facebook

Technorati Tags: copyfight, screening, StealThisFilm