Students for Free Culture @ The University of Wisconsin

so, after kind if wandering around and getting a feel for the area, i found a nice spot in the auditorium area and sat myself down (it was right about now that i realized, while trying to set up my computer, that wireless was going to be a bit of a problem). the first panel was centered around “remix culture” and was made up of brown university music ethnographer marc perlman, uc berkeley doctoral student by day, and dj by night, larisa mann, stanford fair use representative anthony falzone, and global lives founder (?) david evan harris.

this panel really set the tone for the first half of the day, which seemed thoroughly geared towards the issues surrounding remixing and a general stretching of the idea of what actually constitutes a remix.

marc perlman kicked things off by giving examples of remixes dating back through the past few centuries, citing examples as diverse as an 18th century mashup by louis moreau gottschalk and the dialogue-via-remix that thelonious monk and dizzy gillespie had with the song round about midnight. larissa mann presented the copyright infringing, yet value adding, genre of baltimore club music, which was a regional dialect that was already fairly close to my heart. anthony falzone talked about some of the landmark court cases pertaining to sampling laws (biz markie, the beastie boys, n.w.a.), pointing out that for some curious reason none of these cases had used fair use as a defense. oddly enough, fair use has worked as a valid defense in more than a few copyright suits brought against visual artists. the problems of fair use as a defense was a common thread on a lot of my conversations throughout the weekend, and i’ll go into the topic in greater detail momentarily. david evan harris seemed a bit of an odd choice to finish off this panel. global lives is a video installation that he and many other people have been working on where 10 people from around the world are video taped continuously for 24 hours, which results in a total of 240 hours of video. even though the global lives project sounded and looked like a really interesting installation, i don’t really remember why he was part of the remix panel.

the conversations that i kept running into pertaining to fair use started at lunch (i know i’m getting ahead of myself chronologically here, but bear with me) when i ended up sitting down with larissa and chatting with her. the conversation went to copyright ad fair use, as many conversations did for many people over the weekend, and we found our way to the topic of girl talk. i was asking why she thought girl talk had yet to get sued despite his albums being made up solely of hundreds of uncleared samples. her response was that he hadn’t been suid since it was very very likely that a fair use defense would trump the claims of the record companies. basically, they’re choosing cases that they know they can win. another conversation i had over dinner about fair use was in regards to why some of the people who have actually been sued didn’t use fair use as a defense, and the response i got was that fair use, in those cases, wasn’t the best defense due to it’s huge gray area. another interesting point was that even if fair use was to trump the claims of the record companies, since fair use is judged on a case by case basis, it would set only a very weak legal precedent. these were all concepts that i hadn’t considered.

the next panel was not particularly interesting to me, though it might be interesting to you. the panel was made up of uc berkeley students who had been working with developing a presence for their college on second life, both with classes being taught, and archeology digs being recreated. if second life and the real life applications are interesting to you, i really advise you go and check out their site.

next up was richard rinehart, who is the digital media director/adjunct curator of the berkeley art museum. rinehart spoke about the very unique problems that digital artists, as well as the problems that curators of digital museums have to endure. the main problem that i picked up on was the problem of payment. digital art is unlike traditional art in that in place of a commonly understood tangible product there is a bunch of ones and zeros sitting in a server or on a hard drive. the market for these works, as well as the best ways to preserve and present them, will be a very interesting topic to follow in the coming years. the complex ways that visual artists, particularly photographers, utilize creative commons licenses was also discussed.

after a quick lunch break (which included me trying to use a one laptop per child laptop to make a quick post to the board explaining why i wasn’t blogging as live as i had originally promised), everyone hustled back into the auditorium to catch lawrence lessig introduce his soon to be released book remix: making art & commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. lessig, who has scrapped his free culture lectures in favor of his current project, change congress, claimed that remix had been done more than a year ago, and given the wacky world of print publishing, was only now coming out. after introducing the book, lessig took general questions from the audience with topics ranging from all points of his career.

lessig made a really great point about how free culture chapters across the world had to get out and party more. this idea, coupled with the baltimore club music from earlier in the day kinda kicked me in the ass. why haven’t we thrown a massive party? not to discount the very serious issues we’re attempting to tackle, but man o man wouldn’t it be great to get together some friday night and get down to some of the booty shakingest, most copyright infringingest, and generally funtacular music? i mean, i dj. i have a ton of illegal-sample-heavy records that could make people get up and dance… so, that’d be on a friday, let’s say, and then on the following tuesday or whatever, we all get together and watch some documentary, or flyer a department, or call our congressman, or some other wildly productive thing… how awesome would that be? a lot awesome, that’s how awesome.

i’m gonna catch a bit of shut eye and write more this afternoon. sorry for the work-in-progress that this series of posts has become, but it’ll all get dissemenated soon enough.

pictures are gonna take a little while longer. i need to get them up on flickr since wordpress is kinda awful with loading them in a reasonable amount of time.