Students for Free Culture

Martine Rife said, "There needs to be more activity with preserving student fair use rights," referring to a recent decision to allow film studies professors to hack into DVDs for teaching purposes. She says that society is "focused on what the teachers can do, and what’s good for the teachers, but there isn’t really anyone saying, ‘Where are students’ fair use rights? What’s going to make sure that students can use their materials?'"

Fortunately, students around the world are rising to combat the wornsening situation. Students for Free Culture is an international group that started at Swarthmore, and other chapters quickly formed at other schools. Elizabeth Stark, a Harvard Law student, started the chapter at her school.

“I had always been really interested in technology, and knew I wanted to do something with it,” said Stark. “I had found out about [Lawrence] Lessig and his work back in 2003 and read his book and had been reading his blog. When I decided to go to law school, I decided that it was an issue that I really wanted to work on.”

Stark says that the chapters are tied more by an ideology than any official measures. “We are essentially a group of student volunteers across the country. We may not agree on every topic, but we do have common goals.”

The student group uses Lessig's ideas as a platform for activism. “There are two main issues that we address," said Stark. "First is the ability to share, access and modify culture. We think that a culture that has many resources is a more vibrant culture. We want to promote that cultural vibrancy through freedom to open access. The second thing is promoting technological freedom.” That includes fighting DRM and supporting free software.

The group was given national attention through a recent New York Times article, but Stark feels that there were many inaccuracies. The article implied that Students for Free Culture promote illegal file sharing. “[Peer-to-peer file sharing] raises these issues to public consciousness, but (it’s not) our main inspiration as a group,” said Stark.

Many people have trouble grasping the idea of free culture, thinking it means that everything should cost nothing. On why people are slow to understand the issue, Stark says, “I do think that it is because [free culture] is new and because it’s not an idea that translates to physical media. There’s this cost that’s inherit in producing physical things that we don’t have for digital copies. The digital generation – the people who have grown up with digital media – can basically understand better.”

The SFFC manifesto will inspire anyone who has ever felt restricted in their use of the Internet: "The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons."

(Source: Elizabeth Stark and http://freeculture.org/)

Elizabeth Stark (right) of Harvard Free Culture, and Ben Mazer of Swarthmore Free Culture, at an anti-DRM protest with Defective by Design. (photo courtesy Fred Benenson, founder of the NYU Free Culture Chapter, under a Creative Commons license)