Students for Free Culture @ The University of Wisconsin

they do! and, it’s pretty lame that the last post didn’t have any. sorry bouth that, guys and gals. i’ll post a link to my flickr page as soon as i get all the pics from the weekend linked up over there. for now, here’s the official conference flickr page.

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.

you might notice that the subject of this post doesn’t have a specific day attached to it. this is on purpose, cause i wanna switch gears for a second and talk about the really awesome ideas that bubbled up from the conference.

*** DJ Night! we need a damn party. we need one soooo bad…

*** T-Shirts! we need someone to put together an awesome t-shirt or two, or three. take the copyleft logo, or the creative commons logo, or whatever (the guy walking around with the “fuck copyright” shirt kinda made my day). we can use these as fund raiser tools, promotional awesomeness, etc.

*** we need some super-sweet posters to put up around campus. we need to do more to advertise our group and our events and the causes we support/despise. this will happen more as we get some more people to the meetings.

*** speaking of which: i know i picked a really crappy meeting time for the organization. i’m really sorry for that. after this week though, no more. we need a new meeting time where a lot of people can get there. i’ll filter more of this info through the facebook group and the mailing list as soon as i can.

*** We need people to read the local papers. madison is a big city an
d has a bunch of newspapers, free and otherwise. i know
we’re all really really busy and all, but keeping tabs on anything that pertains to the free culture cause, either for or against, we need to know about. we can write letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, petition local officials, anything to make our voice heard, and heard loudly.

*** Wikis Take Wisconsin! so, i was talking to one of the guys from the NYU free culture org, and he was telling me about wikis take manhattan, which they had helped organize. basically, it was a contest to see who in NYC could document the most things (adding pictures, making new pages, significantly editing/correcting existing pages) on wikipedia! the winner won dinner with jimmy wales, the founder of wikipedia. basically, i want to adapt this for students at the university of wisconsin, people of madison, possibly wisconsin as a whole. more on this later.

i’ll also write up more from the weekend in a day or so i have to finish up the first day (still!) and write up the unconference from sunday.

so, the next panel was on the topic of transparency in politics. the members of the panel were noel hidalgo of noneck.org, justine lam of politicker.com, and joshua tauberer who created govtrack.us. noel hidalgo was an interesting dude. he has been spending the past few years, through luckofseven.org, trying to get to all 7 continents on $7,777.77, all of which was donated by 700 people donating $11.11 each. i can’t quite recall exactly what it was that he was involved with as far as political transparency goes, except that he has been a big proponent of it, going so far as to get deported from china for documenting free tibet rallies during the recent summer olympics. in speaking with noel a few times over the course of the conference, i was really impressed by his work and involvements with numerous political and social groups, both national and local. justine lam was a very interesting panelist, having worked with the ron paul campaign, helping to raise oodles and oodles of money utilizing innovative grassroots methods. joshua tauberer’s site tracks bills and translates the legalese into text that most of us could understand. he made an interesting comment in regards to an audience question, where he said that he really wished that his site wasn’t as necessary as it actually is, with thomas.gov being the closest approximation, which he finds to be terribly lacking in many ways.

i should probably mention the really great software that the conference was using to pool questions from the audience. backchan.nl is a product of MIT’s sociable media group that allows internet users to post questions and vote on the questions posted by others. so, all throughout the first day of the conference, there would be a web page of questions above the panels or speakers, with the questions being ranked according to their voted-upon relevance. this was a great addition to the conference and it’s a technology that i can see being very useful to many people.

after the political transparency panel was an interview with john lilly, ceo of the mozilla corporation, makers of firefox and thunderbird, conducted with david weekly, ceo of pbwiki.

my coverage is kind of dragging on and on, and there really is a ton to keep talking about, and i’m gonna keep rolling these updates out as i’m able, but the sheer amount of what went down is so daunting. feel free to ask questions in the comments, y’all.

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.

today us what they’re calling an UNconference. what this means, for those who are like me and have no clue what it might imply, is that the topics are crowd sourced. there were means for topics to be submitted yesterday and those became topics that will be examined today in smaller groups. it looks like possible topics are going to include

• 1.2 Fair Use
• 1.3 Non-Free Confessional
• 1.4 Free and Open Gaming
• 1.5 Gender and the Free Culture Movement
• 3.1 Free Culture and ROFLCulture
• 3.2 Run Your Own Conference
• 3.3 FC Blog Planet
• 3.4 RIAA v. Universities
• 3.5 Fundable grant requests
• 3.6 Assembling low-cost FM and TV transmitter kits
• 3.7 Make Your Own Stencils
• 3.8 Open Access
• 3.9 Starting an OpenCourseWare Platform At Your School!
• 4.1 Defective By Design
• 4.2 Development/A2K (Kevin and Tim have been talking about the noon slot in our invites to people)
• 4.3 YouTomb
• 4.4 Anomos

i’m still a bit squiffy on the way this is all gonna fall together, but i’m sure it’ll all work itself out nicely. as always, i’ll update the blog as i’m able to, but it’ll probably be tonight before i’m able to really get on top of things, perhaps paying the cash money that the san fran airport needs to let me use their wireless… but oh well.

i hope all’s well with the people back home who’re still checking in on me!

the view from the front of the inernational house was excepional, looking out west towards the bay the golden gate bridge was clearly visible.

registration was pretty breezy and everyone was incredibly helpful and patient. once you got through registration, you entered the main hallway that was packed with a dozen or so vendors. the eff and creative commons were there in force, as were representatives from the wikimedia commons, one laptop per child, and the us pirate party.

this was really interesting display where you could check out an archeological site that a group of berkeley students had exactly recreated in second life which was a step towards what they had termed “open archeology.” heady stuff indeed.

i got to play around with the one laptop per child laptops, which was cool. i wasn’t a huge fan of the interface they had going, but the idea behind their organization is a pretty awesome one.

this was the conference space before people started filing in.

next post i’ll break down the individual panels and keynote speakers for everyone back home.

after a long long long day, one that finished with a dance party where a doctoral student played booty shaking records, one which will be closely followed by another long long day…

i have to get some sleep.

i promise to get all of this conference info back to y’all at home though. i have taken, and will continue to take, solid (super-solid!) notes of the days discussions, as well as picture after picture (i have a hundred or so after only one day, some of which are crap, but a lot of which could be considered to be, at the very least, interesting). all of this will be communicated back in a thoroughly thorough fashion. guaranteed.

until tonight…

the wireless here in the international house auditorium has turned my little laptop into the equivalent of the kid that was always picked last in p.e., which is to say, it’s become a bit slow. it took about 15 minutes for this page to load, for example, and i’m not even going to test how long it would take for photos to post onto this here bloggaroozie. know that i’ll get as much up tonight as possible, as well as a first day wrap up. sorry to anyone who’s been trying to keep tabs along the way.

in brief, i had lunch about 7 feet from lessig, and i’ve been talking to a bunch of people from all over america, each with great ideas and volumes of support. it is awesome!

i posted a thing the other day about both mccain and obama advocating open debates, and lo and behold, it seems to have potentially backfired for the one that’s not “that one.”

yeah, i know it’s something of a low blow, and that mccain wasn’t intending any racial overtones with his comment, but awesomely enough, mccain had gone on record encouraging just this sort of (presumably unexpected) use of the debate content. i’ll be interested to see if there’s any response from the mccain camp to this youtube clip (or any of the others) since it seems to be making the blog rounds.