It’s taken me a while to blog about my Phoenix column from last week, “Recording Swarthmore History,” in which I advocate for the school to dedicate itself to recording, preserving and sharing online events which take place on campus. I’ve gotten positive responses to the article so far. Andrew Abdalian says that there are no tapes of the Nirvana show on campus, which is disappointing. I went to Olde Club this Saturday night and did some taping with my camcorder of the bands playing there, the Love Pumps and Manticore, and the Love Pumps already gave me permission to post their show to Archive.org. Rock on! Now I need upload that video…

I must confess, however, that I neglected to check one “fact” in my column, since I wrote the article on the plane to San Francisco, and didn’t have enough time to ponder it once I returned to an internet connection. Sadly, it is not true that They Might Be Giants actively encourages people to share their live concerts on sites like etree.org, although many popular bands including And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, 311, Godspeed You Black Emperor, the Grateful Dead, Guster, Phish, and Tenacious D do actively encourage sharing and archiving, according to the Archive.org List of Trade-Friendly Bands. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that TMBG might also support sharing of their concerts, given TMBG stunts like “Dial a song” and the fact that they both provide free mp3’s and sell mp3 and FLAC digital downloads on their site, which is “artist owned and operated.” They are rather enlightened.

Unfortunately, they are selling mp3 downloads of many of their live concerts, which they specifically ask fans not to share: “Do us a favor and do not distribute these to the internet – we all need new boats.” It’s likely that they wouldn’t appreciate fans sharing inferior recordings of the same shows, or even sharing recordings of different shows, if they have to compete with them. However, the people at etree.org did ask permission back in 2003, and it seems they have not yet received a response one way or another. Perhaps it’s worth asking again, just to try to get TMBG to take a clear position?

At least we can take comfort in the fact that TMBG sells you good old mp3s, not DRM’d copy-protected crap that will only play on your iPod. It could always be worse…

Sometimes it pays off to IM that random person on your buddy list whom you haven’t talked to in a while… out of the blue I IMed fractalpanes today, and she mentioned in passing a couple of articles that involve me, one somewhat indirectly.

First, there’s a good story at Campus Progress, which unfortunately suffers from truly horrid alliteration in its subtitle, two teenage digital Davids down Diebold, and gets our name wrong in its title, “Swarthmore Free Culture” (the correct name being Free Culture Swarthmore). Of course, I can’t really blame the reporter for confusing the name… many of the other FreeCulture.org chapters named themselves the other way around, like Emory Free Culture.

The second article, Clear-Cutting the Future: We’ll Hear More About This in 2005, mentions the Alternet story on FreeCulture.org in passing, and I get quoted! Except that it’s misattributed to Desirina! Man, I was *that close* to being famous… easy come, easy go. I do like the TV-B-Gone gadget that the author mentions, and I think he’s got 2005’s trends down pretty well. But he really should have read the article that he was quoting a little more carefully.

In conclusion, when you poke your buddies, sometimes they reveal useful information! It’s like an RPG where you have to talk to everyone to complete the level. Or maybe it’s not, really…

If you want to see me and you live on the west coast, catch me this weekend in San Francisco!

I’ll be attending a conference run by Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student group that is working on a Creative Commons style license for drug patents. Sadly, their current site, EssentialMedicine.org, relies entirely on Flash in a truly painful fashion. When I want to give my eyes a rest, I visit a copy of their old site instead, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They put out a call for help with web design a while back…. if you know anybody who can give them a hand, please contact them!

At any rate, I’ll be flying out there Thursday evening, staying over until very early Sunday morning, and then heading back to Swarthmore. Wish me luck with airport security!

UPDATE: UAEM fixed their website, no more nasty flash! Reward their hard labor and visit EssentialMedicine.org again ^_^

Nelson on panel at Yale’s Reblaw conference, originally uploaded by fcb

If you missed me at RebLaw, and you want to catch up, the video we shot on my camcorder of my panel is on archive.org: Reclaiming Culture panel.   Also, here are the pro-quality photos that Fred from NYU took while we were there and posted on Flickr: photos tagged with “yalereblaw party” Fred is now our official free culture paparazzi 😉

I’ll be speaking at the University of Iowa this Friday, Feb. 25th, at a symposium on IP law called Intellectual Property: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. I’m on the “Fair Uses” panel, at 11:15am, with Siva Vaidhyanathan and others.

Incidentally, the host for this conference is Kembrew McLeod, the man who trademarked the phrase “freedom of expression”, and the author of Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. It’s about “life in the age of Intellectual Property Madness”, and it was both published by Doubleday/Random House and released under a Creative Commons license a week or two ago. Lessig recommends it! It also happens to quote me multiple times, as I mentioned in an earlier post, so go download or buy it, and look me up in the index! One of my quotes actually doesn’t appear in the index… I’m mentioned on page 220, along with Rebekah Baglini of Bryn Mawr Free Culture, in connection with the “Barbie in a blender” project.

So yeah, if you know anyone at U Iowa, tell them to come check me out!

I will be speaking on a panel at the 11th Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School on this Saturday February 19th, at 4:30pm.  I will be on the “Reclaiming Culture” panel (see the schedule), along with Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU and Glenn Otis Brown of Creative Commons.  If you’re in the area, please swing by and see me!  If you come earlier you get to have lunch with the panelists, if you come later you get to party with… me, at least, I don’t know if the other panelists are hanging around, but I plan to attend the entire conference.

Personally, I’d love to see a Yale Free Culture group, I think we’re finally starting to build up some momentum at FreeCulture.org 🙂

Those who have been watching my blog closely may have noticed that this is not the first time that I’ve spoken Yale, and I hope that it won’t be the last!  They seem to like me, and I certainly like them.  It’s certainly an honor to have shared a stage with Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge, Mark Hosler from Negativland, and DJ Spooky (that subliminal kid), as I did at the “Digital Mix” event.  Besides, I get to hang out with cool Yale Law students like Rebecca Bolin and James Grimmelman, both of whom I met while interning with the EFF.  If you come see me at Yale, you’ll get to meet cool people too!  Just ask me if you need a place to crash for the conference if you haven’t got one already, I’m sure I could help you find something.

I dreamed that Downhill Battle had started some kind of free culture television station, that was striking fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere. They had gotten some kind of TV studio through grants, and they were building it up into a juggernaut.  And it was changing everything… all of those people who watch TV but don’t go to free culture websites, who don’t listen to podcasts, etc., it was reaching them all. Which was like the entire nation. I’m not sure how they got the show into people’s homes, maybe they partnered up with TiVo or MythTV/Torrentocracy or something. The shows were just people, people who were tired of being passive, and it was so beautiful that I wanted to cry.

Today there are 3 articles related to me online, two in the Swarthmore Phoenix, and one on Keystonepolitics.com. 

– The one that I’m most proud of is the first installation of my tri-weekly column called “Peer to peer”: Swarthmore ITS an ally in quest for freer society. 

UPDATE: Eric Behrens of ITS responds.

– I was kind of frightened by the Nelson-worship in this article, The Nelson in you.  This was a positive, friendly, and well-written article about Free Culture Swarthmore, but I’m not sure how I feel about my leadership role being emphasized so heavily.

– The KP Interview: Nelson Pavlosky, Founder of FreeCulture.org – This one took me FOREVER. The reporter asked me to respond to all of these questions, and some of them were really hard! And since my responses were going to be printed verbatim I had to put in a lot of time making them pretty. I’m glad I did it, as I answered a lot of questions in writing that I never had to answer before, but in the future I think I’ll try to make the reporters do more of the work 😉

“I know the best reason why we should call it GNU/Linux… so that Richard Stallman can get on with his life.”

Sarah had a pearl of wisdom the other day about the Linux vs. GNU/Linux naming controversy: “I know the best reason why we should call it GNU/Linux… so that Richard Stallman can get on with his life.” And Sarah is right… in one e-mail exchange with RMS, I was trying to make a point, but I accidentally said “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”, and he focused on telling me what I already knew, which is that “GNU/Linux” is ideologically superior, rather than responding in more depth to my point. It’s a waste of RMS’s time for a smart, creative, influential man like him to go around repeatedly telling people the same thing over and over again. In the words of ESR, “Hackers (and creative people in general) should never… have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren’t doing what only they can do — solve new problems.”

I realized recently that this somewhat applies to me as well, even though I’m not much of a hacker and I’m certainly not as useful as Richard Stallman (yet). I tell a lot of the same stories over and over again. This is good, insofar as through practicing I become good at telling these stories, and it’s also more interesting for people to hear about, say, the Diebold case from my own mouth. But there is one particular story which I am tired of telling, because it makes me angry every time I tell it, and I want to put it in the past. I’m going to write it down once on my blog, and then in the future whenever it looks like I’m going to have to tell the story of how I was defeated in a student government election through sabotage and sleaziness, I will simply point people to that post, and carry on with my life.

That will be the subject of my next entry: The Rise and Fall of the Action Party.

UPDATE: OK, maybe not the next entry, but it’s coming soon and I’ll link to it from here.

As I may have mentioned, Sarah Brown is my hero for letting me stay in her apartment for the week… waking up here is wonderful, I love her decor. I think today we’re just going to stay inside, I’m going to work on reading through and proofreading the Public Knowledge website. She’s going to work on her law school application essays. Wish her luck! (Sarah said that she wants her name linked to the Public Knowledge mailing list signup page so that we can googlebomb it… I don’t know if that’s really the best place to find information about her, but you should definitely sign up now!)

For those who I haven’t already told, I’m doing my winter “externship” with Public Knowledge, a public interest advocacy group for free culture issues based in Washington DC. (An externship is like an internship, except it’s only for a week or so over winter break.) This was actually a “create-your-own-externship”, because I missed the deadline for officially applying for an externship through Swarthmore’s Career Services office, so I just IMed a few people and invented one independently. Fortunately, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to be on time and not procrastinate, so that won’t be a problem anymore ^_^ *knocks on wood* Even more fortunately, I’m planning to crash the official externship party in DC with Lisa, so I’m getting all the benefits without all of the paperwork! Circumventing red tape makes life better.