(cross-posted to bloomington)

Hi all,

I just found out from Lawrence Lessig's blog post about FreeCulture.org, "an international student movement for free culture", that is about digital empowerment - opposing things such as software licensing (you don't own that copy of MS Office you just purchased), digital rights restriction (DVD region system, music copy protection), and even electronic voting machines that do not leave paper trails!

I'm mulling over the possibility of starting an IU chapter of Free Culture; we'd probably want to start with a bang, i.e. beginning of spring semester at the earliest, but I just want to gauge the level of interest for this.

For further reference, please refer to:

• Free Culture (the book that inspired the movement, available as a free download)


• Magnatune, an online music vendor that provides royalty free use of its music for non-commercial purposes, under the Creative Commons license


• Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to lawful sharing using flexible licensing schemes


• The WIRED CD, a collaboration of Creative Commons, WIRED, and famous artists such as The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Gilberto Gil, that is free to share, noncommercially sample - some tracks even allow commercial sampling

The Free Culture site has flyer templates, etc. that we can use - there's only been 13 Free Culture college chapters, we stand a decent chance of being registered as one of the first 20 if we get our act together soon.

Hope to hear back from y'all :)

- Michel