Students for Free Culture
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| Mission | Promoting free culture among secondary education students and young people. |
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| Website | freeculture |
Students for Free Culture, formerly known as FreeCulture.org, is an international student organization working to promote free culture ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of former Stanford, now Harvard, law professor Lawrence Lessig, who wrote the book Free Culture, and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. Students for Free Culture has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.
Students for Free Culture is sometimes referred to as "FreeCulture", "the Free Culture Movement", and other variations on the "free culture" theme, but none of those are its official name. It is officially Students for Free Culture, as set for in the new bylaws that were ratified by its chapters on October 1, 2007, which changed its name from FreeCulture.org to Students for Free Culture.
Students for Free Culture has stated its goals in a "manifesto":
The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.
It has yet to publish a more "official" mission statement, but some of its goals are:
According to its website, Students for Free Culture has four main functions within the free culture movement:
Students for Free Culture had its origins in the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC, now Free Culture Swarthmore), a student group at Swarthmore College which would eventually become the first Students for Free Culture chapter. The SCDC was founded in 2003 by students Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky, and was originally focused on issues related to free software, digital restrictions management, and treacherous computing, inspired largely by the Free Software Foundation. After watching Lawrence Lessig's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture" however, they expanded the club's scope to cover cultural participation in general (rather than just in the world of software and computers), and began tackling issues such as copyright reform.
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