UPDATE: NYTimes, LETTER ; images + additional linkage provided by newsgrist:
Published: October 12, 2007:
Free in Speech, Not Cost
To the Editor:
In "File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints" (Education
page, Oct. 10)*[see below], Students for Free Culture is portrayed as an
organization that promotes the illegal consumption of music and movies
free of cost. In fact, we deeply believe that authors and creators
should be compensated for their work, and we are eager to promote ways
to do so in an environment where the world can build upon their
creations.
For example, an author may release a book under a
free copyright license, spurring on sales, or a band may allow fans to
share and remix their songs, selling out concerts as a result.
We
stand for a culture where everyone has the right to participate and
where works are made available for all to legitimately access, share
and remix. This is a culture that is "free as in speech" — not
necessarily one that is free of charge.
Elizabeth Stark
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 10, 2007
The writer is a founder of the Free Culture Group at Harvard.
*article via NYTimes; images + additional linkage provided by newsgrist:
File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints
By RACHEL AVIV
Published: October 10, 2007
When Zachary McCune, a student at Brown, received an e-mail message
from the university telling him he might have broken the law by
downloading copyrighted songs, his eyes glazed over the warning and he
quickly forgot about it. "I already knew what they'd say about
file-sharing," he said. "It's become a campus cliché."
But the next day, he realized the message had an attachment from the Recording Industry Association of America,
a trade group that is coordinating legal efforts by record companies to
crack down on Internet piracy. The attachment told Mr. McCune he faced
a lawsuit with potential fines of $750 to $150,000 for every illegally
downloaded song.
"I was stunned by the extremity of the
punishment for taking songs I could have bought for a few cents," he
said. "It seemed grossly out of proportion."
Twelve Brown
students received these letters; Mr. McCune ended up paying $3,000 to
settle the claim. But the experience made him interested in changing
intellectual property regulations. Last spring he co-founded Brown's
chapter of Students for Free Culture, a national organization sprouting
up on college campuses that advocates loosening the restrictions of
copyright law so that information — from software to music to research
to art — can be freely shared.
"The technology has outpaced the law," said Mr. McCune, who is now a sophomore.
Established
at Swarthmore College in 2004, the group has chapters at more than 35
universities across the country. "We will listen to free music, look at
free art, watch free film and read free books," reads its manifesto,
posted on its Web site, freeculture.org. "We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism."
Members
assert that the Internet has made it necessary to rethink copyright
law, and they talk about the group's goals with something like the
reverence that earlier generations displayed in talking about social or
racial equality.
"People wonder why college students aren't
rallying more around the Iraq war," Mr. McCune said. "If there were a
draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this
cause because we're the ones bearing the burden."
Cory Doctorow,
co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the
recording industry lawsuits were not "scaring students away from
file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness." Last
year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture
chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.
Opposition
to the music industry and its efforts to protect copyrights often
dominates discussions on campuses. Chapters have organized
demonstrations in front of major record stores and held "iPod liberation" parties where students have downloaded software together that makes it possible to swap songs.
Many
chapters have held forums to discuss legal decisions and developments
in copyright, frequently debating what it means to "steal" something as
amorphous as a digital file.
But in recent months, the group
has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first
national conference, held at Harvard
in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave
presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished
countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.
"File-sharing
may have brought these issues to public consciousness, but it’s not our
only inspiration," said Elizabeth Stark, founder of Harvard's Free
Culture group.
Some chapters have rallied around the Federal
Research Public Access Act, a bill that would make it mandatory for
government-financed research to be published in online journals, free
to the public.
The movement is not without its critics. Early on,
Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more
consequential problems to rally around than access to music.
"Part
of what's so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access
to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to
medicine," he said. "The movement does itself a disservice by blending
all the issues together."
There are student dissenters, too. At
Brown, David Harrington, a senior who did not join the new chapter,
said he sometimes felt like the "grumpiest, curmudgeonliest old man in
the conversation" for understanding the position of the recording
industry.
"I'm a musician, so I'm thinking, how are these
artists going to earn a living?" he said. "The technology makes
stealing so easy that it's hard to tell whether this debate is about
ethics or just convenience."
Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the
recording industry group, said he had never heard of Students for Free
Culture. But he said his group did not plan to let up on its efforts to
protect music copyrights.
"Some say illegal downloading
couldn't possibly hurt successful artists, which may very well be
true," he said. "But we rely on a few successful artists to compensate
for all the new, risky ones who don’t recoup what’s invested in them."
The movement has its roots in an incident at Swarthmore, when two
sophomores posted online internal e-mail messages from Diebold Election
Systems, which makes electronic voting machines. The company ordered
the students to remove the documents, asserting that the messages were
its own intellectual property, and threatening a lawsuit. Instead, the
students won a lawsuit against Diebold for abusing copyright law.
Propelled by their victory, the students started the group, which they named after the 2004 book "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig,
a professor at Stanford Law School. The book applies principles from
the so-called free software movement — the idea that computer users
should have the liberty to copy, distribute and modify software as they
wish — to all aspects of culture. Too many copyright restrictions, Mr.
Lessig argued, dampen creativity.
"Copyright should be a boring
subject, but more and more people are realizing how big this is," said
Cameron Parkins, 21, a member of Students for Free Culture at the
University of Southern California. "You mention the name Lawrence
Lessig to the right people, and they'll just go bananas."
Before beginning their meetings, the members of New York University's chapter place a copy of "Free Culture" at the center of their conference table.
"I wouldn't say it's a bible, but we do often reference it," said Fred
Benenson, 23, president of the group and a master's student in N.Y.U.'s
Interactive Telecommunications Program. His group has held lectures,
protests and an art exhibition, with all work licensed under Creative
Commons, a nonprofit organization that allows authors to change
copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved" or "No Rights Reserved."
There are around 15 regular members in
N.Y.U.'s chapter, Mr. Benenson said, and the mailing list includes more
than 600 people. He said he and others were working on composing a list
of the top 10 universities with the most restrictive policies for
licensing scholarly research, software and student work.
"Students
want to know which universities are going to take away their freedom on
the Internet," he said. "The academy is meant to be this wonderful,
separate part of the world that exists for the sharing and reusing of
culture."
