Initial stirrings at Swarthmore College

Students for Free Culture had its origins in the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC), a student group at Swarthmore College. 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.^[5] After watching Lawrence Lessig's OSCON 2002 speech entitled "free culture"^[6] 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. In September 2004, SCDC was renamed Free Culture Swarthmore, laying the groundwork for Students for Free Culture and making it the first existing chapter.

OPG v. Diebold case

Within a couple of months of founding the SCDC, Smith and Pavlosky became embroiled in the controversy surrounding Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), a voting machine manufacturer accused of making bug-ridden and insecure electronic voting machines. The SCDC had been concerned about electronic voting machines using proprietary software rather than open source software, and kept an eye on the situation. Their alarm grew when a copy of Diebold's internal e-mail archives leaked onto the Internet, revealing questionable practices at Diebold and possible flaws with Diebold's machines, and they were spurred into action when Diebold began sending legal threats to voting activists who posted the e-mails on their websites. Diebold was claiming that the e-mails were their copyrighted material, and that anyone who posted these e-mails online was infringing upon their intellectual property. The SCDC posted the e-mail archive on its website and prepared for the inevitable legal threats.

Diebold sent takedown notices under the DMCA to the SCDC's ISP, Swarthmore College. Swarthmore took down the SCDC website, and the SCDC co-founders sought legal representation.^[7] They contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation for help, and discovered that they had an opportunity to sign on to an existing lawsuit against Diebold, OPG v. Diebold, with co-plaintiffs from a non-profit ISP called the Online Policy Group who had also received legal threats from Diebold. With pro bono legal representation from EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic, they sued Diebold for abusing copyright law to suppress freedom of speech online. After a year of legal battles, the judge ruled that posting the e-mails online was a fair use, and that Diebold had violated the DMCA by misrepresenting their copyright claims over the e-mails.

The network of contacts that Smith and Pavlosky built during the lawsuit, including dozens of students around the country who had also hosted the Diebold memos on their websites, gave them momentum they needed to found an international student movement based on the same free culture principles as the SCDC. They purchased the domain name Freeculture.org and began building a website, while contacting student activists at other schools who could help them start the organization.

FreeCulture.org launching at Swarthmore

On April 23, 2004, Smith and Pavlosky announced the official launch of FreeCulture.org,^[8] in an event at Swarthmore College featuring Lawrence Lessig as the keynote speaker^[9][10] (Lessig had released his book Free Culture less than a month beforehand.) The SCDC became the first Freeculture.org chapter (beginning the process of changing its name to Free Culture Swarthmore), and students from other schools in the area who attended the launch went on to found chapters on their campuses, including Bryn Mawr College and Franklin and Marshall.^[11]

Internet campaigns

FreeCulture.org began by launching a number of internet campaigns, in an attempt to raise its profile and bring itself to the attention of college students. These have covered issues ranging from defending artistic freedom (Barbie in a Blender) to fighting the Induce Act (Save The iPod), from celebrating Creative Commons licenses and the public domain (Undead Art) to opposing business method patents (Cereal Solidarity). While these one-shot websites succeeded in attracting attention from the press and encouraged students to get involved, they didn't directly help the local chapters, and the organization now concentrates less on web campaigns than it did in the past. However, their recent Down With DRM video contest was a successful "viral video" campaign against DRM, and internet campaigns remain an important tool in free culture activism.

Increased emphasis on local chapters

Today the organization focuses on providing services to its local campus chapters, including web services such as mailing lists and wikis, pamphlets and materials for tabling, and organizing conferences where chapter members can meet up. Active chapters are located at schools such as New York University (NYU), Harvard, MIT, Fordham Law, Dartmouth, University of Florida, Swarthmore, USC, Emory, and Yale.

The NYU chapter made headlines when it began protesting outside of record stores against DRM on CDs during the Sony rootkit scandal,^[12] resulting in similar protests around New York and Philadelphia.^[13]

In 2008, the MIT chapter developed and released YouTomb, a website to track videos removed by DMCA takedown from YouTube.^[14]

Other activities at local chapters include:

• art shows featuring Creative Commons-licensed art,^[15][16]
• mix CD-exchanging flash mobs,^[17]
• film-remixing contests,^[18][19]
• iPod liberating parties, where the organizers help people replace the proprietary DRM-encumbered operating system on their iPods with a free software system like Rockbox,^[20]
• Antenna Alliance,^[21] a project that provides free recording space to bands, releases their music online under Creative Commons licenses, and distributes the music to college radio stations,^[22]
• a campaign to promote open access on university campuses.^[23]