Students for Free Culture @ The University of Wisconsin

lemme run down some of the most interesting things that i came across from the unconference from sunday:

***there are a couple of dudes i met from the i-school at berkeley who are working on making a browser add-on for end user license agreements (eulas). this would pop up whenever you came across a eula and would list the benefits/not-so-benefits of signing the agreement, as well as possibly list infractions or weaknesses that the company you’re signing with has committed or is aware of (what a great idea!). a lot of talk was had as to the availability of personal information on the web, who your personal information belongs to (does it belong to you? the company who paid however many thousands of dollars for a database somewhere?) and a few other general privacy issues.

***there was a library issues breakout group that was really cool. the person who organized it didn’t show, so we kinda shot the poop about libraries, with the two people involved with libraries (myself, and a super cool lady from UC Davis) kinda leading the others, answering questions and more or less trying not to sound uninformed. the ideas that came from this little group were that every free culture chapter should get in contact with its university library since the libraries have goals that parallell free culture in every way. also, libraries need to be using open source software. this is something i’ve looked into since the conference, and there are examples out there of open source library software (Koha), but it still looks like it has a ways to go until a library running it doesn’t need more than a couple full time it staff. this is a good direction though.

***drm is bad. very bad in fact. a session with a dude from the free software foundation led me to question the ethics of overdrive, which is the company that libraries use to link their patrons to audiobooks, music and movies. does overdrive have the exact same morals as libraries when it comes to their collected information about what you’ve checked out through them? for that matter, how much information are they actually receiving on their end if any? are they susceptible to subpoenas of their records? i’m kind of trying to run this info down since i got back from the conference, and i’ll keep interested parties in the know via this here blog space.

***what are the specific file charing policies that UW has? a dude from georgetown is looking for people to ask the right people these questions (do you pass along riaa letters? do you throttle high traffic in the dorms? what mechanisms do you use to check if people are downloading illegal stuff? etc) and then compile a list of these results, organized in a heirarchical order from loosest to strictest. this would be a way to show some of the harsher schools that it is in fact possible to loosen up their restrictions/principles since there are big name schools that have done as much and aren’t getting spanked by the riaa as hard as they would think. i’m in the process of getting a letter drafted to find out where uw officially stands on this.