From the Campus to the Commons

The Free Culture movement made an auspicious entrance into Rebekah Baglini’s life. The Bryn Mawr student says that she learned about the open source and free software movements in an introductory computer science class. Then, while surfing the Web to learn more about these issues, she came across an announcement for a lecture to be given at Swarthmore College by Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the influential book, Free Culture.

“The philosophies of the free/open source software movement really coincided with the way I'd always thought about the nature of intellectual evolution and advancement,” Baglini wrote by e-mail, explaining why she embraced the movement wholeheartedly. “The free culture movement is about taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunities we have today to learn, create, share, communicate, and progress culturally and intellectually. Technology offers us these opportunities, but we're finding that the law limits technology, sometimes in very negative ways.”

What exactly are those negative ways? Well, Baglini, and the rest of what is now the core team of activists who came together to launch FreeCulture.org, after attending Lessig’s lecture, have plenty of examples. Perhaps the most obvious ones can be seen daily in the battle over file-sharing and music ownership.

In their online manifesto, the group singles out both the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the proposed Induce Act, which will make punish technology companies for making any device that might "induce" or encourage buyers to make illegal copies of songs, movies or computer programs.

Another example Free Culture activists mention is the effort by “Microsoft and others” looking to create “hardware-level monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their own machines and their own data.” In other words many things – from images to sounds to language – that can still be collected and downloaded (regardless of whether it’s technically legal) may soon become inaccessible to even the most tech-savvy users.

These are just a few reasons why today – a year and a half after Lessig’s notorious speech – these students are at the helm of a growing movement. Thanks to their primarily Internet-based organizing, Free Culture boasts chapters on 14 campuses, including Yale, Columbia, NYU and the University of Michigan. Their shared beliefs revolve around protecting the “digital commons” or an online world of art and culture that belongs to everyone and can be owned by no one. Free Culture advocates also tend to believe that today’s copyright laws were designed for “the analog world,” (i.e. the world before the Internet), and that corporations are now desperately using them to ensure they continue to profit off the digital age.

Although the Free Culture Movement is relatively new, FreeCulture.org co-founder and Swarthmore junior Nelson Pavlosky says he’s been working on these issues for years. Pavlosky and his friend Luke Smith are perhaps better known — for now, anyway — as the students who won a case against Diebold last year. The international corporation sent Swarthmore a cease-and-desist order when the two published some of the company’s e-mails on their university-hosted Web site. Pavlosky and Smith fought back, refusing to settle out of court because they felt that Diebold was illegally using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A California district court judge agreed, and their point was made.

Diebold wanted the e-mails removed from the Web because they suggested that the company knew about flaws in their electronic voting machines before the 2000 presidential election fiasco. But Pavlosky says that America’s voting system, while obviously an important issue, was never he and Smith’s main concern. (They had already founded the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons.) The pair was much more focused on the misuse of copyright law that the cease-and-desist order relied on, and the chilling effect this type of action has on our culture.