The details again:

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

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!

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.

This session will also be for those people who are interested in learning more about the OLPC in general, and what they can expect if they’re expecting a special delivery. Come with a jump drive, and of course if you have one — your OLPC.

Here’s the info for those of you who can’t be bothered to read non bolded sentences:

NYU OLPC Jam Session
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
12pm-5pm
721 Broadway, 4th Floor
Room 442

Please RSVP here (registration required) here. If you are not NYU and have not registered by Saturday AM, we will not be able to accommodate you.

Having an OLPC is not a requirement but please come prepared to do work and learn.

Please sign up and feel free to discuss and post anything related to free culture (@NYU and otherwise) but please try to stay on topic, avoid spamming the list with announcements that are only marginally relevant to what we do, and no flaming.

Let me know if you have any issues or thoughts, but please, go forth and discuss!

UPDATED:  No meeting on Oct 8th because that’s Columbus day! Instead we’ll be meeting at the same time and place on Tuesday the 2nd.

Monday, October 02, 2007
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #909

Monday, October 08, 2007
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #909

Monday, October 22, 2007
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #912

Monday, November 05, 2007
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #907

Monday, November 19, 2007
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Monday, December 03, 2007
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Monday, January 28, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #907

Monday, February 11, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Monday, February 25, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Monday, March 10, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Monday, March 24, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

Wednesday, May 07, 2008
8:30 PM – 10:00 PM General Meeting in Kimmel Center Room #903

• FreeCulture.org : This is the “National Organization” as we refer to it. It’s basically a good place to see who is doing what else in the Free Culture world. I’m on the board, but it’s just a title — local chapters are really where the action is at.
• Free Culture Chapters Around the World : See all the other schools where chapters are located.
• FreeCulture.org has a discussion e-mail list, and an announcements list.If you’re looking to debate and talk about Free Culture and these issues on campus, the discussion list is probably the best place in the world for that. Sign up for the announcements list as it’s a good place to learn about Free Culture news before it hits the media.
• Creative Commons, EFF, The Free Software Foundation, and Public Knowledge are the big institutional players in our world, and many people working in the free culture movement either work with them, for them, or around them. Check out their sites for more information about what they do.

More readings, and blogs after the Jump!
Some Readings:

These are all short articles that you should be familiar with if you’re getting into this world (they’re all free to download and share):

(in vague chronological order)

• John Perry Barlow. The Economy of Ideas. 2.03 WIRED 84 (March 1994)
• Samuelson, Pam “The Copyright Grab”
• Boyle, Jamie “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain”
• Moglen, Eben “Dotcommunist Manifesto”
  
• Docotorw, Cory “DRM Talk @ Micrsoft”
  
• Stallman, Richard “Free Software, Free Society”
  

Things happen quick in this world (though, as a lawyer I once knew likes to say, “There’s never an emergency in copyright.”) so the best place to read about news is usually blogs.

• Slashdot
• BoingBoing
• Lessig Blog
• IPac Blog
• EFF DeepLinks
• Against Monopoly
• Creative Commons Blog
• The William Patry Copyright Blog
• Tech Dirt

The best way to read all of these blogs is to use a RSS reader. I recommend Google’s Reader, but you can also use Bloglines, or the reader in Safari.

This list is in now ways complete, so please add your suggestions in the comments. Thanks!

Click here for exclusive coverage of Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday the 31st.

Click here for exclusive coverage of Cory Doctorow’s presentation on Friday the 19th.

Thanks again to Mike and NowPublic.com for hosting the video and photos!

These stories are for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt. They’re available non-exclusively — meaning other people may be working from the same material — and the cost is a dollar apiece.

There’s a simple written agreement to sign, which imposes a couple of restrictions, and that’s it — once you’ve paid your dollar and signed the agreement, you’re free to adapt or mutate the story as you please.

People are making films, writing songs and doing all kinds of other cool things with Lethem’s work. Check out more information here.