Greetings All,
I hope you've had a wonderful summer and are ready for another exciting year of Free Culture activism at NYU. In case you don't recognize my e-mail, or who I am, my name is Fred Benenson. I started Free Culture @ NYU with Inga Chernyak when I was an undergraduate. I'm now studying at NYU's ITP School at Tisch so that means I'll be around for at least another two years. Anyway, I've spent a while thinking about projects or events that we could do at NYU this year. Here are some ideas:
(1) Hassle NYU about how much they pay for their subscriptions and submissions to academic journals. Researchers, grad students, and professors all pay quite a lot of money to not only access academic journals, but to submit their own work to them. There are an increasingly large amount of legitimate alternatives that use Creative Commons licenses and support the open access fight. The Public Library of Science is one of them and is quickly becoming considered one of the best biology and science journals in the country. If we could get only one professor or student to sign on to publishing with an alternative journal, this would be a huge victory for free culture. Even writing an op-ed for the WSN is a great way to advocate change. Students should know how much of their tuition goes to paying copyright royalties for journals that publish in digital formats, and have e
ssentially zero marginal cost for publishing.
More links to get informed:
The Public Library of Science >>
http://www.plos.orgScience Commons >>
http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq
(2) Hassle NYU about using BlackBoard. BlackBoard is the proprietary, expensive, and unintuitive system that NYU uses for academic online resources. I'm in the current stages of researching an open source alternative, but one thing is clear : BlackBoard is out to abuse copyright and patent law in order to trap universities into using their proprietary and closed source software. Educational tools should work for universities, not against them.
More links to get informed:
US Patent Office Strikes Again: Awards Broad Patent to Blackboard >>
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/announcement/us-patent-office-strikes-again-awards-broad-patent-to-blackboard Sakai (open source alternative) >>
http://www.sakaiproject.org/
(3) iTunes Protest at the Apple Store -- The crack for iTunes DRM version 6 was just released today (
http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 ), and although the crack is in a rudimentary form, it will not be long until it is automated and a more user-friendly version is distributed. Access to and fair use of the files purchased from iTunes makes sense, legally and ethically -- if you spend thousands of dollars on iTunes, why shouldn't you have the right to backup your files, create remixes, and do what you've been able to do with your CDs for years? DRM doesn't work, every iTunes song is available on file sharing networks and the record companies are no closer to stopping piracy than they were when they first filed suit against Napster. DRM exists to frustrate legitamite users and make sure no one remixes without permision, DRM does not exist to stop piracy, or even to ensure musicians get paid. I propose we
go to the Apple store and hand out CDRs and flyers with the
iTunes DRM crack on there -- we need to strike fast before Apple
modifies their DRM in order to break the crack, but I'm sure we can get
some good press over it.
More links to get informed:
Cory Doctorow's talk on DRM :
http://junk.haughey.com/doctorow-drm-ms.html
Sony pays musicians
4.5 cents per iTunes track :
http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/4310.html I'm going to book a room at ITP in the next couple of weeks to hold a first-meeting-of-the-year and get organized, so keep an eye out for that announcement e-mail, but for now, if you are at all interested in the above topics or have any other ideas on events or actions we can do, please contact me, I'd love to hear about it.
Best,
Fred Benenson
