Free culture advocate to speak

In print | Published April 22, 2004

The Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons is going international.

The organization, founded by Nelson Pavlosky ’06 and Luke Smith ’06, will launch freeculture.org tomorrow.

The Web site will serve as a forum for an international student movement “dedicated to fighting coercive copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information,” the press release said.

To help celebrate the launch, SCDC has invited Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig to speak at Swarthmore.

Lessig is the founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society and the recent author of “Free Culture,” a book published and available for free online. He also represented book publisher Eric Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenged the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Eldred will also appear at tomorrow’s event.

Pavlosky and Smith invited Lessig to their launch. “Lessig mentioned us on his blog,” Pavlosky said. “After the Diebold case, we figured maybe we had enough national attention that we could convince famous people they could come.”

“Lessig coined the term ‘free culture,’” Pavlosky said. “He’s a huge inspiration for our movement.”

Lessig shared his views with The Phoenix on the growing free-culture student movement. He will speak in Science Center 101 tomorrow at 7 p.m.

What will your lecture focus on?

My hope is to make salient the importance of the free culture movement as something people more than lawyers have to get involved with.

What do you think of freeculture.org and their attempt to make free culture an international student movement?

It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened since my child was born. I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve seen. It’s extraordinary.

What I think is best about it is that it’s entirely authentic. The free culture movement is born because you guys find yourselves in the middle of an insane war, which is totally a product of the insanity of the copyright system, so it’s great. It’s really exciting.

When did you yourself get involved in free culture? In college?

There wasn’t such a thing when I was a college student, back in the dark ages. Even in law school, no one took intellectual property law, because it was a totally boring subject, which had no relevance to anything in the world. But I’ve been involved in this for the last five or six years, because, as I’ve done work in the interaction between technology and policy, the problems about intellectual property have become the most important and the least understood — and the problems that cause the most harm to free society. So getting people to recognize that free speech is one part of a much more fundamental set of freedoms, and that culture is not guaranteed through free speech, is an important thing for people to see.

It’s one thing when a law professor talks about it, but when you start having a student movement around it, then I think we have a real chance to communicate.

In the context of your dedication to free culture, what would an ideal society to you look like?

An ideal society to me is one where a much wider range of people feel empowered and capable of adding or contributing to the process of building culture. Look at the way society functions when people tell each other stories, and then imagine that same capacity spread on the Internet — criticizing, complimenting, adding to, contracting from. The problem we’ve got right now is that freedom, which we thought we had already guaranteed through free speech in the Constitution, is threatened because so much of what is important to us is also called property, and you can’t use property without permission.

You just wrote a book which is free online. How else do you participate or make your mark in free culture? For example, do you download songs off the Internet?

I don’t download songs. I’m a little bit afraid of being a victim of overeager targeting. But you know, I write a book, I give away as much of the content that I can. But I go around trying to get people excited about this issue.

Where do you see the media going in the future?

If we’re successful, what we think of now as commercial culture will continue to grow a little bit, but it’ll be supplemented by this extraordinarily interesting, diverse, closer-to-regular-people, bottom-up, other system of culture.

I think ultimately it’ll be economically more important because it’ll drive us to purchase a lot of machines and bandwidth technology to manipulate it. And politically more important because how you sell on blog space will be just as important as how you sell on “Meet the Press.” So it could be an exciting time. If we don’t win this battle, then, you know, just imagine the Soviet Union and spruce it up with a little Hollywood.

There’s a sense in which your freedom to participate in the culture gets determined by the judgment of an ever-smaller number of people. That won’t silence those who want to engage in free culture, it’ll just push them underground. So there’ll be the black market of culture, just like there was in commerce. And all the cool people will be playing the black market. That’ll be fun and interesting but ultimately, I think, really destructive, because in a democracy you’re supposed to have rules that people actually believe, not what five companies believe. If you don’t have that, then you have a lot of really destructive tendencies that grow out of revolt or resistance.