Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) was initially established by students fighting Diebold Election Systems over free speech rights. The lawsuit brought by Swarthmore College students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith came as a result of internal company emails posted on Pavlosky and Smith's website which pointed out flaws with Diebold's proprietary e-voting software. In response, they received threats from Diebold Election Systems alleging copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The court ruled in favor of Pavlosky, and Smith, and on the heels of the victory, they went on to form FreeCulture.org, a recently christened non-profit seeking to create a participatory environment for the creation of culture by leveraging the power of digital technology.
FreeCulture.org, inspired by the likes of Lawrence Lessig and his non-profit Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have spread the “Free Culture movement” beyond Swarthmore College. Student groups under the Free Culture banner are now located on 13 campuses around the US and growing. Other groups like Downhill Battle have joined the fight.
The movement has gained national attention through some rather innovative campaigns. Their work has helped put DJ Danger Mouse, who remixed the Beatles and Jay-Z, on the map through Grey Tuesday, gained national media attention with Barbie in a Blender, and highlighted the perversities of copyright law through the Eyes on the Screen initiative. If nothing else, it has lent a voice to those concerned with the state of intellectual property.
It seems in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions concerning Grokster and Brand X, the Free Culture movement has its work cut out for them. Pop and Politics interviewed Nelson Pavlosky, one of the founders of FreeCulture.org, about their success in fighting a 2.1 billion dollar company and their transformation into a group fighting to free culture.
Pop and Politics: After the lawsuit with Diebold, what advice can you give to activists who will become embroiled in future fights over free speech?
Nelson Pavlosky: Don't feel helpless: There are a lot of people who believe in freedom of speech and who have built organizations to help protect it. We received pro bono legal representation from the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We were lucky, but as the saying goes, "Men make their own luck"... know what organizations you can turn to for help when the going gets tough. When dealing with the Internet and technology issues, you'll probably want to call the EFF, while for many other free speech issues you're going to want to contact the ACLU for help.
P&P: Swarthmore College, in response to legal threats from Diebold, pulled the plug on your website in 2003. Do universities have any responsibility in protecting their student’s free speech, especially in light of the dean of your university publicly endorsing your actions?
NP: Yes, it is clear that educational institutions ought to be dedicated to the free exchange of ideas. Given that, they should do what they can to protect their students' freedom of speech. We're grateful for the help that Swarthmore gave us. Although we were disappointed that they did not take a more proactive role, they were more supportive than many other universities would have been.
P&P: With a win under your belt against a billion dollar company, do you have prospective targets you feel are chilling free speech?
NP: I have no intention of suing anyone else in the near future, as much fun as the Diebold case was. However, there are certainly people, organizations, and companies that pose a threat to freedom of speech, both online and offline, and we'll be there to stand up to them.
P&P: Can you give us a brief description of the term Free Culture and the Free Culture movement?
NP: Our focus is on how we can build a more participatory culture. If you don't want to be regulated to the role of a passive consumer, this movement is for you. We think it's important to remember that people can be producers as well as consumers. We think that the division in our culture between artist and audience, writer and reader, etc. is an artificial and outmoded one.
As Lawrence Lessig, who coined the term "free culture," once summarized it:
1. Creativity always builds on the past
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past
4. Ours is less and less a free society
(if you haven't seen that speech,check it out here.)
Among the tools that the past uses to control the future are copyright, patent, and trademark law, which are often incorrectly grouped together under the name of "intellectual property" law. Whoever came up with the phrase "intellectual property" was an excellent spin doctor, because they set the free culture movement back decades. Let me make it completely clear that we do not oppose the ownership of property: we are not going to come and take your car or your house. We don't even necessarily oppose copyrights, patents, or trademarks. We merely believe that those areas of the law should serve the purpose of the Progress Clause of the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts."
What we're saying is that, especially in light of the possibilities offered by modern technology, there needs to be a better balance between the rights of "producers" like the Record Industry Association of America and the rights of "consumers." We believe that, if copyright were less restrictive, people would be less "consumers" than participants in a common culture, more able to remix and reinterpret the flow of information around them. Our inspiration is Linux and the Free / Open Source Software movement, in which powerful software is developed and distributed under a license that allows anyone to download, use and modify it for free as long as they contribute their work back to the common pool. We feel that, as it stands, copyright is more a barrier to creativity than an incentive for it. Our focus is on fair use and the public domain as a commons, rather than copyright as private property.
P&P: Including Swarthmore, you have 14 chapters around the country at high profile universities such as Yale, Columbia, and NYU among others. How do you coordinate activities with such a wide support base?
NP: We have a conference call every week, as well as several mailing lists, where we discuss the issues and make decisions. We also rely heavily on instant messaging, IRC chat rooms, and VOIP, especially to communicate with our international contacts. We use wiki software to collaboratively write documents, specifically the Mediawiki software which powers Wikipedia.
We use blogs and aggregators to communicate both with the outside world and with each other. Recently, we've been making some tough decisions about the internal structure of our organization, and we decided that we needed more input, so we made a post on our blog about it. We got over 20 comments, many of them from lawyers and non-profit experts who gave us good advice. We also encourage each of our chapters to set up a blog, so that we can aggregate their RSS feeds together on the front page of our website. That allows visitors to see at a glance what all of our local groups are up to.
Finally, we try to meet up in person as frequently as possible. You could think of us as embodying the digital revolution that we like to talk about... the Internet has been critical to our formation and our early successes, and it serves as the glue that holds the organization together.
P&P: Freeculture dot org, SCDC, Downhill Battle, even MoveON initially were all niche players in the political discourse. Yet all of these organizations have had tremendous success in breaching the mainstream media market. MoveOn has become a major player in Washington and you have been profiled in the New York Times, among other publications. How have you raised the visibility of your issues and your organization with little funding?
NP: No question, the Internet was our primary means of raising our profile to the point that mainstream media picked up the story. The Diebold case was covered online long before the New York Times ran their article on us. Since then, we've done several Internet based campaigns, such as "Save the iPod", and Barbie-in-a-Blender Day, as well as local outreach on college campuses. We helped send a "free culture tour" around the country featuring guitarist and spoken word artist Colin Mutchler, and I've done a few speaking gigs myself.
Finally, we convinced Prof. Lessig to put a link to our website on the front page of the website for his book "Free Culture," saying, "If you're looking for the student movement, click here"... that's netted us a number of recruits, because any student interested in the issues is probably going to come across Lessig's book at some point or another, and then they'll know that we exist. But ultimately, the Internet is responsible for our high profile, at the same time as it serves as the glue that holds our organization together.
P&P: While researching for this interview I found on your website an email sent by one of your founders, Luke Smith, to other members of the group stating his concerns on keeping the momentum alive from the Diebold case. His suggestion was to concentrate on building an open-sourced student content repository. Have you adopted his idea or gone a different route?
NP: We think that this will be an important initiative next year, and we've begun talking to people about it, but it is still in the planning stages. We also think that open access publishing is an important issue that, as students, we are uniquely situated to have an effect upon, since our power base is within the very universities which produce research and academic writing, and whose libraries suffer from the prohibitive costs of journal subscriptions.
P&P: I want to broaden the discussion a bit. In your manifesto, you say the Internet has opened a window of opportunity. What do you see as the three most important opportunities created by the Internet for the average citizen?
NP: 1. Free publishing (through peer-to-peer services or websites like Archive.org) and its corollary, free access to information, making communication and learning truly democratic.
2. The related ability to form communities, to collaborate better with others around the world and within their own neighborhood.
3. The power that the first two opportunities places in the hands of the multitude, to apply pressure to the authorities, to force the official power structures to serve their interests, to make businesses pay attention to them (see http://www.cluetrain.com). The "average citizen" may not be interested in changing the world or instigating a revolution, but they are interested in avoiding (or punishing) businesses that have lousy customer service. They also may be more willing to stand up for their rights and hold the government accountable when the barriers to participation and organization have been lowered.
P&P: “A window of opportunity” presupposes the window will eventually close. Why such a pessimistic view? What is being done to the Internet today that you believe is closing that window?
NP: Technology provides the opportunity for much larger-scale openness and sharing than before, but also much larger-scale central control.
We take our freedom on the Internet for granted, but if you want to see a "domesticated," controlled, censored Internet, all you have to do is look at the Great Firewall of China (see this article). There's nothing stopping that same model from being implemented here, except for the work of activists such as ourselves.
For the moment, the Internet is still a way for ordinary individuals to connect to each other. Many people in the content industry, however, want it to become something closer to television, just a way to push content out to consumers.
P&P: The Supreme Court just heard arguments concerning Grokster, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting Apple Corp. in court over journalistic rights versus trade secrets. What do you believe will be the impact of these cases on society as a whole?
NP: If the peer-to-peer networks survive the final decision in Grokster, we will see a continued trend towards independent music, towards artists who are able to reach their audience out without selling their souls to major labels, and towards independent creativity in general, outside the realm of music.
P&P: Do you ever worry that you are preaching to the choir?
NP: Certainly not, we're generally not talking to people who are already members of Creative Commons, EFF, Public Knowledge, etc. While there are many adults who belong to and support these organizations, so far there has been little penetration among the youth of America, and that's pretty much the reason that FreeCulture.org exists. We woke up one morning, looked around, and saw that there were no other students working in this space, and we decided we had to change that, we had to build a student movement.
P&P: As a follow up, I heard Lawrence Lessig say that once artists embrace the discussion wholeheartedly the lawyers and the extremists will fade into the background. How do you at Free Culture dot org aim engage artists and do you believe this is the correct method in approaching the idea of a free culture?
NP: Well, one thing that we're trying to do at Swarthmore College is help students to freely license video and audio under Creative Commons licenses and upload them to Archive.org and similar sites, which provide free hosting for material as long as you're willing to share your stuff with the world.
To kick-start this process, I went and filmed a few student rock bands, and then with their permission compressed the video and uploaded it for them. They were really happy to have their performances available online, to share with their friends and family, and people who are thinking of offering them gigs. See my article "Recording Swarthmore History."
Another thing we are trying to do is encourage student artists to build off of each other's work, and to allow others to do the same, to have artistic conversations. The freedom to share and borrow ideas is essential for artists who want to make art that is relevant to the culture around them. Perhaps more importantly, it can help build a strong artistic community.
The idea of "cross-overs" is familiar to anyone who has seen movies like "Alien vs. Predator" or "Freddy vs. Jason," or followers of Marvel and DC comics... you've probably seen "Marvel vs. Capcom" machines at the arcade. But mixing artists and stories together shouldn't just be a marketing ploy, and it doesn't have to simply enrich media corporations. It can enrich our creative lives, and it can help build a strong independent artistic community, which otherwise would have more difficulty competing with the corporate media.
The best example of our attempts in this area was our project UndeadArt.org. It's a bit of a long story how that project came about... My freshman year, I was the "production assistant" for a film that my friend Kate Duffy made. Basically, that meant that I held the clapper before each scene and got to yell out the scene number and take number. The film was called "Amid the Dead," and it was billed as "an existentialist zombie movie." It contained a number of references to the cult classic zombie film, "Night of the Living Dead." A year or two later I was hanging out with Holmes and Nick from Downhill Battle at a Creative Commons benefit concert, and they mentioned that "Night of the Living Dead" was in the public domain, due to a copyright accident back in the 1960s. In fact, you can download the complete film for free, legally, from the Internet Archive. Something clicked in my mind, and I saw an excellent opportunity for a remix/mashup contest. I had convinced Kate Duffy to release the movie under a Creative Commons license, so my friends and I uploaded the film to Archive.org, and soon people were putting the two films together in interesting ways. The winner of the UndeadArt.org contest was a person who made a mock PSA about "how to survive a zombie epidemic" using footage from the two movies. Kate was very happy with the results, and asked whether I could help her upload her future movies to Archive.org... I said, "Sure, anytime!"
P&P: Where do you see Free Culture dot org going in the next year?
NP: Well, first of all, I see us going international next year... we've been contacted by people from Brazil, South Africa, Great Britain, and Peru, and I'm sure they're only the tip of the iceberg.
Secondly, I see us working a lot more on the local level and doing offline activities. We began as an Internet-based organization, before we had any local chapters, and while Internet-based activism can be an inexpensive and effective way to reach people, it has a limited audience. Some people don't surf the web, and many of those who do will not be exploring pages that link to our campaigns. Also, there are already plenty of organizations in this space who do Internet-based activism, such as Downhill Battle. We are unique because we have local chapters, we have the ability to reach people in the physical world ("meatspace") as well as online (in "cyberspace"). Therefore we should play to that unique strength, and we intend to focus more on our local chapters than we have in the past.
Published in Pop + Politics dot com, June 29, 2005