About
The genesis of the Free Culture
movement lies in Lawrence Lessig's book of the same name, which
defined intellectual property reform as a social and cultural issue
as well
as a legal and commercial one. This position has been taken by
organizations like the EFF, the
Free Software Foundation and others, but
the movement had no real presence in campus activism groups until
2004, when Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith created the Swarthmore
Coalition for the Digital Commons.
Though we started small, we quickly
gained publicity when we involved ourselves in the Diebold
controversy.
Though the Diebold memos raised important questions about the integrity
of electronic voting
systems, it also raised the important -- and often missed -- issue
that Diebold's malfeasance was only uncovered thanks to those who
distributed and publicized the Diebold memos online, in the face
of legal threats from Diebold using the DMCA to force people to
take them down.
The Diebold drama underscored, for us, what we're
all about -- the fact that people undertaking an entirely noble
project for
the public
good can be stymied by ill-thought-out, overly broad intellectual
property laws that have been twisted far away from their original
purpose. We're in a bad place when whistleblowers who would expose
company corruption can be stopped by that company's high-handed
invocation of their "intellectual property rights" over
the evidence of that corruption, and we were proud to be one of
the organizations
that stood up to Diebold's threats, countersued them and overturned
their attempts to cover up their wrongdoing.
But we're not a one-trick
pony. We used the publicity from the Diebold case to disseminate
our message, and soon spawned other
campus groups
at other colleges. We created the website FreeCulture.org to
act as a hub for our nationwide efforts to get out the word about
intellectual
property reform and to oppose the most pressing threats to free
culture in the world today as well as spreading the word about
exciting ways
the free culture ethic is changing our world.
SCDC, now known
as Free Culture Swarthmore, remains the flagship organization
of the campus Free Culture movement, but many students
from all our member organizations have taken on leadership
roles as part of our core team. If your school is one of the ones
that
already has a Free Culture organization, contact your local
FC.org branch and learn how you can get involved. If not, ask us
how
you can get a FC.org branch started at your school. |