Zuneral Services
May 24th (this Saturday)
6:30 PM
JFK Park, Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA

Yesterday, in preparation of the public funeral that will take place this Saturday, members of Harvard College Free Culture entombed the recently-deceased Digital Rights Management in Quincy Courtyard at around 5 PM. As part of the healing process, all the attendees took part in saying goodbye to DRM by constructing its coffin.

The Decedents

The decedents are encased into their pourable-but-not-too-liquidy coffin

The final funeral and burial services for the recently deceased will take place at 6:30 PM on Saturday, May 24th in Cambridge’s JFK Park. A reception will follow to give attendees the chance to reminisce of the short life and accomplishments of DRM and to grieve together.

(Harvard College Free Culture would like to thank Rachel and Jason for their Zune and iPod, respectively. We are sorry for your loss.)

]]> http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~freeculture/blog/2008/05/22/zuneral-this-saturday/feed/ http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~freeculture/blog/2008/05/19/zuneral/ http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~freeculture/blog/2008/05/19/zuneral/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 03:29:45 +0000 xu http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~freeculture/blog/?p=78

We regret to report the sudden, unexpected death of Digital Rights Management. Details of the tragedy at present remain unclear, but he was rushed to the hospital following a direct collision with an oncoming future last week at 10 PM. He was seven years old.

Let us mourn together. You are invited to attend a burial and memorial service for consumer devices containing Digital Rights Management hosted by Harvard College Free Culture.

May 24th (this Saturday)
6:30 PM
JFK Park, Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA

By the way, I learned of this news from John Palfrey, the current Executive Director of the Berkman Center who has recently been appointed the vice dean of library and information resources at HLS. JP has been nothing but wonderful to us for the entire lifespan of HCFC thus far, and we wish him the best of luck in his new job even though we will miss working with him in the same capacity!

“We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.

For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.”

The point he is trying to make is important, but I wonder at his choice to oversimplify the situation surrounding Macs and PCs. With Digital Rights Management being what it is these days,  it is becoming increasingly clear, especially to creators and fans of music, that whether you use a Mac or a PC can govern, legally and without-hacking-technically, what you can do or make with your computers.

Net neutrality is a really important issue, and Damian Kulash should absolutely be applauded for supporting this cause on such a visible platform, but he (and we) should all be aware that it is only one battle in a long series. When we succeed at net neutrality, there will be other issues to fight for that are perhaps even more fundamental as well as more nuanced. I hope all the proponents of net neutrality will recognize the importance of these other struggles and stay on-board. We’ll need all the help we can get!

For starters, Comcast paid off a number of people to warm seats–and we do mean for starters, because there were 35-40 of these people here as early as 7:15 AM for the 10:30 hearing! And though these people were supposed to just save seats for Comcast’s employees, they all stayed the whole time. The result was that by the time the interested public showed up, the courtroom was too packed and many were turned away at the door. Although this is not technically illegal, it definitely makes Comcast look bad–especially when the “seat warmers” doze off…

Luckily, the press is all over this, and Comcast has had to admit their sketchy practices. The issue is so hot that the FCC has even considered holding another hearing at Stanford.

We have to say, though, that the hearing itself was not “disastrous for all involved” as Valleywag described it–in fact, it went quite well for supporters of net neutrality. The Berkman Center did a great job of organizing the event in such short notice, and the panelists put lots of information about the technology into the public record. Responses from the commissioners seemed to indicate that most of them were opposed to Comcast’s filtering of their customers’ internet traffic, and even the normally laissez-faire FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, remarked that the internet should stay free and open to allow for continued innovation and free market competition.

Thanks to everyone who came out! We’ll let you know about any new developments.

So what have we been up to since then?

Over the summer, many of our members were busy doing Free Culture-related things. We sent a big group to iSummit 2007 in Dubrovnik, where they presented Free Culture’s various projects and mingled with other like-minded organizations and individuals. Our members had summer jobs with organizations as diverse as Creative Commons, the ACLU, Students Expressing Truth, and the Participatory Culture Foundation.

We kicked off the ‘06-’07 school year with a roundtable event on shared cultural spaces with Christine Harold, the author of OurSpace. Down the street, recent alum Greg Price jump-started MIT Free Culture, a new and very exciting addition to the Boston FC community. More recently, Dean put together a great Boston-wide Free Culture dinner, we congratulated Elizabeth Stark for being re-elected to the Board of Students for Free Culture, and ROFLCon, a convention/conference co-sponsored by our organization and organized by many of our members, comes ever closer to re-writing Harvard’s coolness factor.

The biggest news of the school year so far, however, is the unanimous vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard to adopt an opt-out “open access mandate” that would require all faculty (unless specifically requested) to put a copy of their future scholarly articles in a university-wide repository accessible to all. Computer science professor Stuart Shieber has been working on this for a long time, and we congratulate him for the success of his efforts. We’re very excited that Harvard has chosen to lead the charge on keeping publication costs affordable and putting scholarship, not profits, at the forefront of the journal publishing industry. For more on the story, read Peter Suber’s excellent overview of the situation or this editorial in the Crimson by Robert Darnton, head of University Libraries.

It’s not too late to RSVP — email freeculture at hcs.harvard.edu or respond to our Facebook Event.

Users are revolting at Digg.com over a fierce take down battle, blogs are disappearing from Blogspot, T Shirts sporting the code are disappearing from Cafe Press, and songs are appearing on YouTube with lyrics comprised of 16 hex keys.

Meet us this Friday the 13th, 5pm at the OLPC office (One Cambridge Center on the 10th floor, near Kendall Sq) for a website unveiling, wiki seeding, and ice cream eating party.

The site is a massive resource for learning how to Make Internet TV (hence MITV). We’ll give a brief overview of the project and then ask for your help with the MITV wiki. It could use some seeding love (for instance, it needs more free-culture/licensing related info and links). The entire project is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA.

Four reasons to come:

1. Eat ice cream (we’ll buy)
2. Find out about MITV
3. Help us seed the Wiki
4. Meet and make Free Culture friends

See you at OLPC’s this Friday the 13th at 5, try to bring a laptop!