Free Culture @ NYU

In an article by Chad Smith at the Villager, a community newspaper in New York, I’m quoted a couple of times regarding Free Culture’s position on file sharing. In the article, Free Culture is described as

a group at the university that champions the rights of musicians and those who are pro-file sharing, rallies against big-industry “exploitation” and looks for ways to lobby for reform on stringent copyright laws.

While I did say the actual things I’m quoted as saying in the article, I wanted to make clear that I did not expliclity label Free Culture as a “pro-file sharing” group. We support musicians that support file sharing. Just to be a little more specific about what I did say, I’m posting my entire email interview, which includes my respones to Chad’s questions here:

From: Fred Benenson Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: chad smith
Date: Feb 26, 2006 10:50 AM
Subject: From a reporter at The Villager newspaper

Chad, here are my answers to the questions… hope they’re what you were looking for.

best,

Fred

—

1) If Free Culture N.Y.U. had to sum up its philosophy or mission statement in one sentence, what would it be?

Our mission statement is available at http://www.freeculturenyu.org/fc-nyus-mission/ , but to be honest, we resist boiling our mission and politics down too much. Over the course of a year, our club has gone from screening public domain films to protesting DRM, and this is only because we haven’t been burdened by a confining mission statement. That said, Free Culture @ NYU predominantly deals with copyright and issues relating to intellectual freedom and technology.

2) How do you guys feel about the RIAA’s targeting of N.Y.U. students. (It seems to most, that N.Y.U. is really being singled out. Why?)

For two years in a row NYU has been rated the “#1 Dream School” by high school students around the country in the Princeton review. It is no surprise then, that the RIAA and the so-called content industry in general, are interested in what our students are doing as our behavior and preferences are arguably setting the trends for future college students. If NYU is really being singled out, then it would be reasonable to assume the RIAA simply fears our students and their preferences the most. It is unfortunate that instead of attempting to cater and appeal to an audience that the RIAA presumably finds so influential and attractive, they decide to sue it and consequently alienate it, but that’s their decision.

3) You guys mentioned in that Voice article that your group — more or less — didn’t want to approach the issues like renegades, but rather, you wanted to operate in a more thoughtful and tempered way. Care to elaborate? Do you think, even slightly, that file sharing is stealing?

The question of whether or not to consider file sharing an act of theft is more complex than it might seem at first, and really depends on who, if anyone, is considered the victim of the theft. Aside from a disastrous attempt by Metallica years ago to convince their fans that they were really the victims of peer to peer networks, it is not clear that many musicians or artists are really all that disenfranchised by file sharing. That said, there is a real group who is threatened by file sharing; these are the middlemen of the industry, the shady figures who have been “distributing” and “marketing” music and films to audiences for the last 50 years. These are the people who loose out on file sharing because they are the ones who want to keep the system as it is now — a system that rewards pay-for-play (payolla), multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, and mafia like distribution and compensation system. The Internet offers an alternative to this system and this is what we want to encourage: a place where artists and producers can cater and adapt to the unique topography of digital media distribution rather than fight it. While it might be easy to encourage file sharing of copyrighted works in order to expedite the demise of the RIAA and MPAA, the real challenge is to create and sustain a system on the Internet where artists and artists alone can be properly compensated for their hard work. This is why Free Culture @ NYU encourages Creative Commons and other “open” or “free” licenses that enable creators to take advantage of the unique character of the Internet.

5)Do you think that N.Y.U. should perhaps put up firewalls, blocking students from even downloading programs like Kazaa, thereby stopping this “problem” in its tracks.

While file sharing networks are typically associated with promoting sharing of exclusively copyrighted work, there is plenty of work on the networks that is either not copyrighted (Public Domain), Creative Commons licensed, or if it is software, GPL licensed, and is therefore legal to trade. This pool of legally shareable work is constantly growing and maturing, and in my opinion, offers significant justification for allowing student access to peer-to-peer networks from NYU. In terms of actually enforcing a campus-wide software ban, NYU would have to seriously increase its vigilance over students and their computers, a consequence that would raise significant privacy and security concerns. But supposing a firewall were erected, NYU would also be forced to start banning other protocols that enable students to share files as well, including AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), FTP (Necessary for students studying computer science) and even HTTP (the protocol the web runs on). This leads to the largest problem of preventing file sharing — the fact that the Internet itself is a peer-to-peer network, and it looks like for now, that as long as there is a will, there certainly will be a way to share files. And I don’t think anyone is going to start doubting the collective will of college students to share their taste in music, or for that matter, any other medium.

6) Finally, what’s on the horizon for your group?

We have a Creative Commons art show opening on March 1st on the 7th floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center at 7pm. That will be running through all of March. We’re currently planning a film-remix contest where we invite people to remix their DVDs of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and The Matrix into short films in order to promote fair use of copyrighted work. After that, we will then be presenting a documentary on the Open Source and Free Culture movement called Alternative Freedom at the Pioneer theater that will be running from April 27th to May 3rd. Next year we hope to organize some more protests, art shows, lectures and a concert! Check out http://www.freecultureNYU.org/ for our mailing list, more news and updates about our club and the world of Free Culture.

Thanks so much, and I’ll keep you posted about the
article.

–Chad Smith

Just, as they say, for the record.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 9:15 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.