Free Culture @ NYU

First Meeting, Yearly Agenda, Etc.

Tuesday, 09.04.2007  –  Category: Meetings, News

Welcome back!

I hope you had a wonderful summer. My name is Fred Benenson, I’m a graduate student at ITP and this is the beginning of my last year at NYU. I started this club during my senior year at CAS with some friends and have been fortunate enough to stick around until now.

Free Culture @ NYU is NYU’s local chapter of the FreeCulture.org Student Movement. FreeCulture.org has chapters around the world and thousands of students involved. We work closely with Creative Commons, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and other technology groups working in the public sphere.

Anyway, Free Culture @ NYU has done a lot in the last couple of years, from protests, to conferences, to art shows, to film remix contests, and it’s all been a lot of fun. This year will be no different.

Check out the rest and information about our first meeting after the jump…

First things first. If you’ll be at the Club Fair on Thursday, we will be too. Please come by and check our table. We’ll have some cool stickers and other free stuff to give away. Hopefully we’ll get in early so we should be by the front. Look for the Anti-DRM sandwich board as made famous by Richard Stallman.

Here are some of the projects we’ll be working on:

• Digital Freedom Concert around NYU. We’re going to be booking some good local bands for a concert around October 15th. It’ll be part of the Digital Freedom campaign that we’re partnering with. More details soon.
• A demonstration at Musician’s Choice educating future musicians about copyright. Yay for street actions!
• Op/Ed’s — Let us know if you’re interested in writing some opinion pieces, we’ll help you get them to the WSN.
• More Talks / Round Tables with famous copyright and technology folks. Previously we’ve had Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net, Jimmy Wales of The Wikipedia, Jamie Boyle and Ray Beckerman.
• The “Hit List” — We’ll devise a list of the worst offending universities in terms of their copyright policies, and general Free Culture friendliness. (Surprise: NYU isn’t as bad as you might think.) We’ll time releasing this for when seniors in high school have to make their decisions about what colleges to attend.
• OLPC coordination — Have you heard of the One Laptop Per Child Project? We’ll be coordinating with them to develop software and content for the laptops. You’ll even be able to get your greasy little hands on one yourself!
• Free Culture @ Columbia — our uptown friends have a very active chapter and we’re looking to coordinate with them on many events.

So now that I’ve got you excited for the 2007-08 Free Culture @ NYU plan, you want to learn more and get involved. Well, you should come to OUR FIRST MEETING OF THE YEAR.

We do things a little different from other OSA clubs — we have a relaxed meeting in the open on the 7th floor of Kimmel. This means you can drop by and find us pretty easily (hint, look for the copy of Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig). It also means we have a nice view of Washington Square Park.

We’ll be discussing the plans for this year, and general digital copyright news.

Here’s the info on our first meeting:

Free Culture @ NYU
“FIRST MEETING OF THE YEAR”
7pm8pm on September 12th 2007
7th Floor of Kimmel
Washington Square South b/w La Guardia + Thompson
Free Food!

And as always, don’t worry if you have never been to a meeting before or have no idea what the DMCA is or why you should hate DRM. If you have even a passing interest in technology, copyright, the future of the entertainment buisness, and the internet, you should absolutely attend.