The SCDC has begun work on writing a play, loosely based upon the science fiction story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. The plot of the short story is that Congress is about to pass a bill that would make copyright last forever, and this woman has to convince a powerful senator that he must kill the bill (Kill Bill! hardy har har). Considering that this story was written sometime before 1983, when it won the 1983 Hugo for Short Story, it was an amazingly insightful story. Spider shows an imperfect understanding of the issues surrounding intellectual property, but the fact that he was writing about it like a decade before anybody else was thinking about it excuses any logic holes. It does, however require updating, to account for both new facts and new understanding of IP issues. The goal is to eventually produce this play at Swarthmore College. Wish us luck!
Tag Archives: free culture
Oppose the FTAA
Stop! Instead of reading this, go do something about the FTAA!
If you don’t know what the FTAA is, or why you should oppose it, read on.
To borrow from globalexchange.org, the FTAA is essentially an expansion of NAFTA, both into new geographic areas such as Central America, South America and the Caribbean, and into new areas of the economy and the law that NAFTA didn’t cover.
Even if you’re not opposed to NAFTA (and if don’t know enough about it to make a judgement, you really ought to research it more), you should be strongly opposed to the FTAA. As reported by IP Justice, the FTAA has a truly horrifying chapter on intellectual property rights. Basically it exports our poorly conceived copyright regime to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and adds on even more autocratic provisions. Among other things, it mandates imprisonment (!) for P2P filesharing for signatory nations, and destroys many of our remaining “fair use” rights. To see for yourself, try searching the chapter for “prison”… then read the whole thing, if you have a legal bent. Otherwise just visit IP Justice’s page.
I just love how the government talks in Newspeak: Free Trade here means “we throw you in jail for trading files”. Are they going to arrest people for making mix CDs for one another? I thought it was bad enough with the RIAA‘s frivolous lawsuits; now we really may get the police spiriting you away in the night for using Kazaa, no joke.
The judge expedites our case
So, in case you haven’t heard, my friend Luke Smith and I are suing Diebold for trying to use copyright law to suppress their internal company memos that expose questionable business practices. We are being represented pro bono by lawyers from Stanford’s Cyberlaw clinic.
Today the judge set an accelerated schedule for our case, which seems like a good thing, since we would like to have free speech again as soon as possible 🙂
I asked the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to link to the website for our club, the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, and they said they would… which would rock! It’ll be like a permanent Slashdotting! Ooh, Branen and all the other SCCS sysadmins are going to kick my butt for this one…
The SCDC is getting big
I’m so excited about how the SCDC is doing! We’ve been getting press from all over the place: the two Swarthmore College newspapers, the Phoenix and the Daily Gazette, Lawrence Lessig’s site, Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”), boycott-riaa.com, a random personal blog… All of these people from across the country are e-mailing and IMing us, wanting to work with us or start their own similar campus groups!
The most interesting conversation I’ve had today was with a grad student from UTexas at Austin, about the licensing practices of Role-Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the Open Gaming License, which is essentially like the GPL, and the more restrictive license D20, which lets you use the D&D brand name but doesn’t let you change the game in certain basic ways. Unfortunately it seems that the D20 license is taking over the industry, which reduces the diversity of games. I honestly don’t know much about the topic, but I expect to learn more about a lot of interesting topics like this through my work with the SCDC. These are certainly amazing times!
It’s really strange to realize that the SCDC is the first organization of its kind; that over all these years, there hasn’t been a student anywhere in the nation who cared enough about these issues to build a club to promote them. Swarthmore does have a somewhat radical, avant garde history though, which is easy to forget when we’re looking at it from the inside. Did you know that a Swattie may have been the first blogger? Here’s the article that says so, and here’s what the first blog looked like. I guess it just looks like a really basic webpage, kind of boring, but the bloggy content and the extremely early date (January 27, 1994!) is what sets it apart. Go Swat!