History
A word from our founders:
The Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital
Commons was the product of our freshman year idealism. We lamented
the lack of an organization
to spread the ideals of the open source / Free Software movement
to other kinds of so-called “intellectual property.” In
that oh-so-liberal-arts moment, we resolved to start one ourselves.
It was not easy going, that year. It was already the middle of
the spring semester, and few people came to our largely incoherent
meetings. Worse, they weren’t the right people — they
had no committment to the cause; they were more interested than
involved. The school year ended, and that was that.
Looking back,
a big part of our failure that year was a failure to think big.
No one wants to help you organize something mediocre.
The way to attract people is by having big but concrete organizational
goals.
Anyhow, we resolved to do better next year, and we did. We
hit early in the semester and lured freshmen to our meetings with
pizza
that
we paid for out-of-pocket. We found a few good people, and had
weekly meetings. Lawrence Lessig’s original Free Culture
flash presentation was well-received and got good coverage in
the school newspaper.
We still had coherence issues, and we lacked a charter, but we
had energy… it was during that time that we wrote the first
version of the manifesto.
Then, out of nowhere, an exciting but
frightening opportunity fell out of the sky. Our friends at Why
War? were hosting the
so-called
Diebold memos — an e-mail archive that revealed flaws in
the voting machines manufactured by that company. Before long
we found
ourselves the target of one of the infamous DMCA takedown notices.
We were unprepared for so much, so fast; those were frantic days
and nights, filled with secret phone calls to lawyers, intense
strategizing, and above all, raw terror. With the help of our
friend Branen Salmon,
we found pro bono representation at the EFF and the Stanford
Center for Internet and Society. Suddenly, we were bringing a
federal
lawsuit against a nearly $2 billion corporation. We assumed that
a countersuit
was inevitable.
In the meantime, Micah White and Why War? were
spreading the Archive to colleges all over the country. More
than 100 hosts
risked liability
by putting the e-mail archive online. For quite some time, Diebold
continued to fire off takedown letters to every school that hosted
the memos.
It wasn’t long before the press began to take
notice of our situation, although most were interested as a result
of the growing
controversy surrounding Diebold’s machines and Direct Recording
Electronic machines generally. Even so, one article in the New
York Times was titled “File Sharing Pits Copyright against
Free Speech,” which featured our overly dramatic photograph.
Though
the case was certainly a lot of fun, it didn’t help
us any great deal with campus organizing. People knew our name
and more about our cause, but there was little they could do
to help
out. After the initial excitement of the case faded and Diebold
backed down, we tried a few other things on campus: first, we
had a LAN
party, which was a raging success; second, we convinced Prof.
Lessig to come speak at the College. He was brilliant, as always,
delivering
an inspiring speech to a packed house. It was at his talk that
we officially launched the website for FreeCulture.org, our proposed
international student organization for free culture.
Soon, the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons was only
one of many free culture student groups on campuses around the
country
(soon to be one of many around the world), and we changed the
name to Free Culture Swarthmore to reflect its new role as a
part of
a greater student movement. Today Free Culture Swarthmore remains
a
leader in the student movement, which is appropriate for the
birthplace of FreeCulture.org. Join us, and ride the shockwave
of an explosively
expanding activist community, which deals with bleeding-edge
issues at the forefront of law, technology, society, and culture.
—
Co-founders Luke Smith '06 and Nelson Pavlosky '06 |