When: Monday, November 10 @ 7:00pm
Where: Reitz Union 288

At Florida Free Culture’s next meeting, we’ll be having a mix-cd swap, discussing good copy/bad copy, and hearing from Grooveshark about their mission to reform the music industry. Bring several copies of a Mix-CD with your favorite music and swap with others at the meeting. The more you bring, the more music you’ll walk home with! We hope to see you there!

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Free Your PC has concluded, and was a great success. Though we did have a few staffing issues, we were able to install software for and spread the word about Free Culture to almost 80 students. We were also featured in the Alligator! We couldn’t have done it without all of our volunteers’ help, so thanks much for all of your assistance!

We’ll be hosting the event again in the Spring, so if you didn’t get McAfee or the Free Software we were offering, be sure to look out for the event again in a few months.

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Florida Free Culture will be hosting Free Your PC Tuesday through Thursday, October 28-30, between 10:00am and 2:00pm at the Reitz Union Colonnade. We’ll be cleaning up laptops, installing free McAfee anti-virus, and lots of other excellent software like Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP. Come get your computer cleaned free of charge and learn about what free software is and what it can do for you!

If you’re computer saavy, we need your help! Please RSVP to help us fix students’ computers and install quality free and open source software on our wiki. The process is completely streamlined, and there will always be someone to help you out if you need it, so there’s no need to worry about it being too complicated. We usually get greater traffic on later days, so lots of help on Wednesday and Thursday would especially be appreciated.

We’ll look forward to seeing you at the event!

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Florida Free Culture will be hosting CopyNight this coming Wednesday night at 7:00pm at the Orange and Brew, just outside the Reitz Union. Come enjoy dinner with fellow copy-fighters and discuss current events related (or unrelated) to free culture! We’ll also be discussing preparations for Free Your PC, which is this upcoming Tuesday-Thursday, October 28-30.

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What: First General Meeting
When: 10/13/2008 @ 7pm
Where: Reitz Union 288

Florida Free Culture will be having its first meeting of the semester on Monday, October 13th, 2008 in room 288 of the Reitz Union. Come learn about the Free Culture movement and how you can get involved! Free food will be provided.

Sign up to attend our event on facebook!

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The suit filed by Faulkner Press against a local note-taking company gained national attention when it was picked up by Wired and subsequently linked to by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing.

The day after the Alligator covered the issue they were kind enough to include the short version of a response from one of our officers, Patrick Flanagan. Here is the longer version of the opinion, which also touches on the substantial problems that Faulkner material has caused due to their restrictive programming:

Faulkner Press is suing Einstein’s Notes for copying class notes without the professor’s permission. Wait, what? I thought college was about passing on knowledge. I guess Faulkner Press disagrees.

Einstein’s Notes service is one that many of my friends and peers value greatly. They value it enough that they’re willing to spend $20 on a notes packet every time their class has a test. The note takers are paid well for their time, and the note buyers are satisfied with the product they receive. It’s a nice example of the free market, but Faulkner Press is upset that
“their” intellectual property is being misused.

This falls so neatly into the “Fair Use” clause of U.S. copyright law: “the fair use of a copyrighted work… for purposes such as… teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use) [and] scholarship… is not an infringement of copyright.” Furthermore, “ideas, … concepts, principles” cannot be copyrighted. And to nail the lid on the coffin, Einstein’s Notes doesn’t just blindly redistribute the source material verbatim; they offer a new product: a summary of the professor’s lecture, and a compilation of useful material for the class. They cite their sources, which is all that is required when using these materials for their notes. Case closed.

I’m actually not surprised that it’s Faulkner Press who is bringing this lawsuit. If you’ve ever used a Faulkner Press digital textbook, you know what I’m talking about. They’re obscenely overpriced, poorly programmed, and restrictive enough to be called suffocating. Their software won’t even let you select text, for fear that you’ll distribute it to the masses. Never mind that you’re a student, trying to write a 10-page philosophy paper, and you have to hand type block quotes from Socrates instead of just copy-pasting.

U.S. copyright law is far from perfect (see the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The fair use clause, however, is one of those laws where the government got something right. If Class Notes (the parent company of Einstein’s Notes) loses this case, then maybe it’s time to take a closer look at intellectual property legislation and fix it once and for all.

This is the digital millennium, and information is literally in the air. The free flow of information is absolutely critical to a democratic society. The University of Florida is a place of learning. Let’s not suffocate ourselves by depriving us of knowledge.

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