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Free culture movement hits campuses across the U.S.

In print | September 9, 2004

The free culture movement at Swarthmore, which was started last year with the founding of the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons by Nelson Pavlosky ’06 and Luke Smith ’06, is making inroads at college campuses across the country.

The movement fights for freedom of speech on the Internet and against overly restrictive copyright laws and media consolidation, according to Pavlosky.

Last spring, SCDC launched freeculture.org, a Web site dedicated to the free culture movement. The site, which serves as an international hub for the movement, has led the movement to grow tremendously, spawning similar groups on campuses all over the United States.

The site provides a database of college free culture groups and is used by students who are starting free culture clubs on their own campuses to coordinate and discuss ideas for their respective groups.

The site also includes a weblog for free culture posters and a self-proclaimed “free culture manifesto” outlining the mission of the free culture movement.

“[Freeculture.org users] have a lot of communication,” Rebekah Baglini, a Bryn Mawr sophomore who is starting an on-campus group, said. “We have conference calls about twice a week.”

In addition to the Bryn Mawr club, free culture clubs are expected to start this semester at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Franklin & Marshall, Haverford, New York University, University of Connecticut, University of Michigan and Yale, Pavlosky said.

Emory University senior Desirina Boskovich, who started a club at Emory this semester, found the Web site after developing an interest in free culture issues.

“For the past year I’d been interested in copyright issues,” she said. After reading “The Right to Read” by Richard Stallman, she found freeculture.org on the Internet while doing some research on the movement and decided to start her own club.

“Getting a free culture club started at Emory was a natural progression [for me],” she said.

Baglini became motivated to start her own free culture club at Bryn Mawr after hearing Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig speak at Swarthmore in April, when he was brought to campus for the launch of freeculture.org.

“That was where I learned about the free culture movement,” Baglini said

Boskovich’s club is one of the more developed of this year’s crop of free culture clubs at college campuses, since the club was able to announce its presence at Emory’s activities fair.

Boskovich said about 50 people are on the club’s e-mail list, and the list-serve has been active leading up to the club’s first meeting.

Other campuses, including Bryn Mawr, have still not held their activities fairs, meaning that many clubs are still in the planning stage.

In the meantime, Baglini has begun to build the groundwork for her club by approaching certain academic departments to gauge their level of interest in the issues involved in the free culture movement.

Bryn Mawr’s Language Learning Center has been especially supportive, Baglini said, since it could be affected by developments in copyright law.

The center often re-records foreign films in VHS format so that students can watch them, an action that could potentially violate laws like the Digital Millennium Act, which have strict provisions banning the copying of certain media.

Baglini has also targeted the art history department at Bryn Mawr, pointing out that copyright laws could affect the use of slides in art history classes.

In addition she hopes to find free culture supporters among student studio artists who look to others’ artistic creations for inspiration and more direct uses and, as such, could come into conflict with existing copyright laws.

The free culture movement advocates having much less strict copyright rules on art so that artists can have more creative license when utilizing older works of art for their own creations.

Boskovich described the main obstacle facing her club as a lack of knowledge about the issues. “People need someone to explain [free culture] to them and hold their hand,” she said.

Lack of interest in a relatively political issue like free culture is a problem she foresees at her school. “Emory is not an overtly activist campus,” she said.

At Swarthmore, SCDC is planning to host more educational events like the campus-wide information meeting held last Thursday. Pavlosky said that about 20 people attended the meeting.

Though SCDC has been involved in a lawsuit with Diebold Election Systems, Pavlosky said that the group does not plan to have voting-related programming this year.

“We’re not voting nerds,” Pavlosky said.

One of his goals is to make SCDC appear friendlier to those who are not versed in the minutiae of the computing world.

“A lot of people have this conception that we’re geeks only. We’re trying to be more accessible to non-geeks,” Pavlosky said.