So, my name is Fred Benenson. Can you hear me alright?
No? Louder? Closer? Closer? Is that closer?
Hello? Hello? Okay. Sorry.
So, my name is Fred Benenson. I just graduated NYU in May,
where I started a free culture club.
We'll be talking about free culture, the organization, in a bit.
But I'm working for Creative Commons over the summer,
and I'm going to be heading back to New York in a bit.
But I've been interested in kind of open source, free software,
everything in terms from hacking to, I don't know, graphic design
since high school when I was reading 2600 and stuff,
and that kind of what got me into it.
But, I don't know. Here's Elizabeth.
Hey, everybody. My name's Elizabeth Stark.
Firstly, I'm kind of losing my voice, so please forgive me,
or if you can't hear me, let me know.
I am a current law student at Harvard Law School,
who apparently needs to check up on their SSL connections.
But I'm also extremely interested in the issues surrounding law, culture, and technology.
I'm kind of a culture junkie myself.
I went to Brown University, and I'm helping out FreeCulture.org.
I am looking to start a chapter at my school next year,
but currently doing a lot of work with the organization,
and representing them here.
All right. So, we came up with this idea to give a speech here
because we wanted to kind of bring FreeCulture to another community,
and we see DEF CON as a kind of great community of like-minded technology folk.
So, let's get started about what FreeCulture actually means.
First of all, this is not in particular order,
but it's a book written by Lawrence Lessig, famous law professor from Harvard.
I'm sorry, he taught at Yale.
He went to Yale, taught at Harvard, now he teaches at Stanford.
He also runs Creative Commons.
So, he's written a couple books.
He's working on another one called Code,
but his most famous one is called FreeCulture.
FreeCulture also means the student movement that we're participating in,
and it all started from a lawsuit at Swarthmore.
But at first we'd like to clarify, though,
we do not claim to be the entire quote-unquote FreeCulture movement.
We are one student organization within the movement
that is composed of professors, academics, artists, technologists,
all different types of people that are interested in the issues
relating, say, to copyleft, to FreeCulture,
not as in free beer, but more like free trade.
And we are a part of that movement.
Sometimes we are accused of claiming that we created the movement.
No, that's not really the case.
We're here representing FreeCulture.org,
which you can see up on the site.
If you want more information, kind of dig through there.
But hopefully we'll give you some here.
I'm going to describe how it kind of came about,
what college students were first involved in it,
because it's actually kind of an interesting story.
I'm going to quote from an article on motherjones.com
about two students at Swarthmore College named Luke and Nelson.
Here, I'll read from the article.
The adventure began in spring 2003
when a hacker broke into dbold's computer system
and under 15,000 internal emails.
In them, dbold employees fret over the voting machine's vulnerability
to hackers and their alarming habit of going on the fritz.
I need some answers, one employee wrote from Florida,
regarding the 2000 recount.
Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 votes when it was uploaded.
Will somebody please explain this to me
so I have the information to give to the auditor
instead of standing there looking dumb?
That's the text in the memos that were published online.
So it was a big deal,
because these memos kind of exposed a glaring flaw in our voting process.
For all the insanity that went on during the Bush vs. Gore election in 2000,
it was a really big deal to kind of think that the voting machines were broken.
I mean, who knows what could have happened if anybody established anything.
So dbold was responsible for these voting machines that went on the fritz.
The memos got left open for the technically minded
in an open FTP directory with no password.
Enough people downloaded it and started passing it around
that it became kind of like buzz on the internet.
Luke and Nelson at Swarthmore picked up on it
because they were familiar with the movement and that kind of thing.
They put it on their website.
So did Derek.
Yeah, so did Derek.
And everyone who was posting on their website,
obviously dbold freaks out and starts sending cease and desist letters.
And the cease and desist letters were really interesting
because they weren't trade secrets cease and desist letters.
They were copyright infringement cease and desist letters,
which is pretty much claiming that the internal memos from dbold
had original art that they were trying to claim copyright on.
And by posting it on a website, you're infringing on the copyright.
It's kind of a big difference between copying CDs and publishing memos.
But as we know, large content companies,
they basically would send cease and desist letters to people
even if they don't have a valid copyright argument
because they want to scare people away.
And this is pretty much the argument in this situation.
These were college kids, other ISPs.
When they first sent the letter to Swarthmore,
they immediately took it down.
Swarthmore freaked out, as any university or college would probably freak out.
They contacted the students and took it down.
Luke and Nelson kind of bit their lip and played by their game for a bit
but then realized that they should stand up for it.
So then they posted the memos up on another site.
I'm not sure where, but it was a big deal
because they were kind of standing up to this big, evil Republican corporation.
We're a non-partisan group, by the way.
Yeah, we're a non-partisan group.
It was these two kids from a liberal arts university
getting threatened by a Republican corporation.
It was a fascinating point.
Anyway, so instead of getting sued by Diebold,
what happens is that they actually sue Diebold
under a provision called 512F, which Elizabeth will talk about.
So as we all know, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
otherwise known as the DMCA, has a lot of provisions that we don't like.
There is something written into it called 512F
that this was the first case to actually test the provision
where if you are accusing copyright infringement,
where it is so basically obvious that this is not a case of infringement,
as if you're bullying someone, which I think Diebold in this case clearly...
Definitely qualified as bullying.
I think a lot of other content companies are doing that as well,
but you can sue under this provision.
The EFF stepped in as well,
and David over here testified for the EFF in the case.
So we have a lot of supporters here.
And they won the case.
The court basically said this is an obvious fair use,
and it was so obvious that they could not have thought
that it was an actual copyright infringement.
One of the big deals was that the information that was released
was actually in the public interest.
It wasn't just some trade secret like Apple's new design for the shuffle,
which is questionably in the public interest.
It was something that actually had to do with voting and the next president
and that kind of thing.
So it definitely qualified as fair use.
The good news is...
They got back attorney's fees and also...
Right, they won the lawsuit, got back attorney's fees,
and won some money for themselves, I think.
So that kind of started a...
It was a sensation at Swarthmore.
It was such a small college in that these kids were in magazines,
New York Times magazine, it was a huge deal.
And they realized that there was really a demand for students
who are interested in the future of copyright,
online, internet technologies and everything,
that there was really a demand for a political movement.
During the Diebold trial, Nelson and Luke had started a group
called the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons.
Not so easy to say.
Yeah, not so easy to say.
But after garnering so much public and national attention,
they decided to just rename themselves to FreeCulture.org
and start a national organization.
So that's kind of how the beginning of the organization worked.
Nelson and Luke kind of worked hard to get it going at Swarthmore
and then started up an email list and got stuff posted on Slashdot
and that's how I found out about it.
I'd been kind of interested.
Lessig's blog as well.
Yeah, Lessig's blog posted about it.
Although, one thing I'd like to clarify is,
as much as we definitely admire the work of Professor Lessig
and we have read his books and whatnot,
he is not the head of our organization.
Some people have accused him of basically rounding up students
to be his quote-unquote chief.
That is not what we are.
This is pretty far from the truth.
And he consistently denies that he has anything to do
with kind of our big decision-making and that kind of thing.
I mean, we named our club after his book.
It's an important document as far as we're concerned,
but there is a lot of difference between Lawrence Lessig and Free Culture.
So just a minor point.
But our goal is to try to make it as student-oriented as possible
and try to keep our board of directors, when we decide on one,
as kind of young and hip and in with the college and university crowd as possible.
And grad school.
And grad school.
Well, university.
So basically this email list starts going around in the,
I guess it's the summer of 2004 and I get on it
and I was interested in doing stuff at NYU
because I pulled an April Fool's prank.
It was a poster from the RIAA saying,
trade in your MP3s and we'll give you iTunes credits.
It was this really elaborate prank and we put up posters everywhere
and people really responded to it and I kind of realized then
that students are interested in this.
This is a topic that people are talking about and arguing about.
And it was actually at the top of all the lawsuits
going against college students for file sharing.
So I coordinated, I got something started at NYU
and kind of went from there.
We're now a club at NYU.
There's an umbrella organization called FreeCulture.org
which kind of helps manage everything.
And Elizabeth and I are in the core committee
and we kind of work from there.
And then we also have a main discuss list
that people kind of post links and argue on and that kind of thing.
And I highly encourage you to join it because it's a very interesting list
with a lot of kind of up-to-date stuff on it.
And we currently have 13 chapters across the country
and firstly we have countless students from other schools
who are interested, who are trying to start up chapters,
who participate in the discussions and the meetings that we have.
And we also have a lot of international interest,
especially from, for example, the UK.
I think somebody just started FreeCulture.org.uk
and they're working on a project out of, I think, where is it?
I'm not sure.
And we also have people in South America.
As some of you may know, South America is extremely interested in,
for example, in Brazil and Argentina,
the free software movement and free culture movement.
So we have a bunch of people interested from there.
So as opposed to explaining kind of our origins,
let's get a little bit more specific.
We see ourselves as do-it-yourself politics.
I mean, that's really the nature of a grassroots organization
is that you kind of identify a problem you have with society
or policy or law and you kind of go from there.
And our main goal is to reform copyright law
and kind of pave the way for sensible technology.
And to educate people about the alternative
and how we can work toward a greater public domain
and freedom of information.
And as students, we're a concerned party.
We're worried that governments, corporations,
and even individuals are making bad choices
about how this stuff is happening.
And these choices threaten to stagnate future progress
and innovation in ways that we haven't really known before
or we won't even ever know.
So basically, we came to DEF CON
because we think hackers should care about free culture.
And we see kind of our goals as an organization
very similar to a lot of the sentiments in the hacker community.
And one of the biggest things that hackers tout
is their right to be curious and explore the technology
that we're using or that they're using.
And we feel that as a main tenet of culture and technology.
So where hackers mainly explore code and systems
and that kind of thing, we like to encourage the idea
of exploring culture and taking and using culture
in similar ways as a hacker.
And code.
And code.
So from that point on, I guess we're going to talk about
some examples of what we consider culture hacking.
People taking bits of culture and remixing them
and reusing them in ways that they were originally unintended.
And to that end, we have a lot of media that we're going to show
and entertaining stuff from the history
of what we like to call culture hacking.
First, I'm going to...
Bear with me if you guys feel like this is too close
to an art history presentation.
But hey, I don't think a lot of other people are talking
about art history at DEF CON.
Here we go.
Get ready.
Fade in.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so some of you may be familiar with this image.
Some of you may not be.
As far as I know, this is one of the first blatant uses
of a remix in Western art.
And this is by an artist named Marcel Duchamp.
This is actually a... Oops. I'm sorry.
Picasso's getting feisty.
Okay, so Marcel Duchamp did this in the early 1900s.
He was a prolific artist dabbling in a lot of different genres.
But this was a postcard remake of the Mona Lisa.
And it looks huge now, but it's actually incredibly tiny.
And he basically drew a mustache on her and wrote L-H-O-O-Q at the bottom.
And when pronounced phonetically in French, that means she's got a...
There you go.
And when pronounced phonetically, that means she's got a hot ass, right?
A nice ass.
A nice ass.
So this is one of my favorite pieces of work, art,
because it ties in so many ideas that were just coming of age
in the early 1900s.
The idea that art is getting whittled down to postcard size.
And this would be something you'd send one of your friends from the Louvre,
and that kind of thing.
But it was Duchamp kind of mocking this,
and kind of coming up and saying that,
well, maybe this is art too.
And so, you know, even though he just drew a mustache on her,
it became a famous piece of art.
And he was widely recognized as being brilliant for this.
And let's clarify something.
When you said this is one of the first remixes in modern art,
I think we take the position that almost all art and all culture
is derivative in some way or another.
I guess I meant it in a literal remix sense,
is that this is exactly, this is a sample,
in its most literal sense.
And before this, my personal opinion is that most music remixes itself
on a metaphorical level.
You're always referencing what Beethoven did, or Mozart did,
and that kind of thing.
So anyway, Duchamp did some more cool stuff.
This is pushing it a little bit farther.
This is a urinal he took from a public metro station, I think, in Paris,
and basically wrote Armut on it,
which was one of his pseudonyms that he released art under,
and put it on display.
And he got it into a museum or gallery, I think,
and it was a sensation.
It blew people's minds in Paris.
People were so angry and excited.
How could a urinal be art?
Yeah, yeah, it was just on the tip of everyone's tongue
in the art scene in the early 1900s.
And I think recently, I can't remember who said it,
but this was voted the most influential piece of modern art
in the 20th century.
And, you know, it's a urinal,
but it's the idea of appropriating something that's already been created.
And Duchamp was one of the first artists to do this.
And our position is,
what if copyright laws were as strict as they are now, back then?
I mean, would Duchamp really have gotten away with this?
I mean, obviously the Mona Lisa's in the public domain,
but who knows about the manufacturer of the urinal?
They probably could have sued him.
Next up, I'm not sure...
I think the original design of the art...
Well, that's for another one to debate.
So this is a shovel.
This is another Duchamp piece.
It's a snow shovel.
He got it at a museum.
I think it's pretty cool.
And this is one of the most famous pieces of modern art.
I'm sure you all recognize.
This is Andy Warhol.
I think he did this in the middle of the 60s.
He pretty much just took a picture of a Campbell's soup can,
got it into a silkscreen format,
and made a ton of silkscreen canvases
with the Campbell's soup can logo on it.
This was a huge deal because
people just loved the idea that he was representing
consumer products as art.
And it was extraordinarily controversial,
just like Duchamp was.
And people couldn't understand why
somebody would put up a soup can and call it art.
But it's lasted over time,
and everyone kind of accepts it as an important part of art.
Campbell's, at the time, didn't object.
They were like, this is great.
Somebody's found a novel way to use our soup can.
Yeah, they didn't sue.
Instead, they found it as promotion for their product.
It's like free advertising.
They thought it was great marketing.
I kind of have a funny story to tell about this,
but I'll save it for the end.
This is another example of Warhol's art.
It's a Brillo.
I think these are larger than life.
Yeah, he scaled these up,
so it's just the idea of turning a small soap pad
into a large kind of box.
Just more appropriation art.
More of Warhol's stuff.
I mean, these are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars now.
I mean, not to say that money is a good value.
Here's Warhol himself.
I'm sorry about the JPEG compression on that.
It's ugly.
More Campbell's soup can.
He's just kind of going crazy with this stuff.
Everyone loves it at the time.
Another famous Warhol painting.
This is actually interesting because he's using
a celebrity's image,
and there's a whole debate going on right now.
It's kind of like cutting-edge copyright.
I'm sorry, not copyright,
but a law debate about publicity images
and whether or not celebrities can kind of claim
ownership of what they look like and that kind of thing.
And I don't think he got permission
from Marilyn Monroe from this at all.
And who knows if she would have objected.
I mean, blue eyeliner is kind of
hard to deal with, or whatever it is.
I don't think he got permission
for this one either.
I'm thinking no.
Alright, on to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
He's another influential painter
of the 20th century
in America.
He was actually good friends with Andy Warhol.
There's some great books and information about Jean-Michel.
He lived in the East Village,
and so I kind of picked up on his stuff.
If you look in the bottom
right-hand corner of this image, I'm sorry,
the Picasso stuff, the overlay is kind of taking over,
but there's a little copyright down here.
Yeah.
Jean-Michel was obsessed
with copyright and kind of like the idea
that images were copyrighted and
that he could use them and kind of
claim domain over them
in his own paintings. So, over and
over and over again, you see his use
of words and
mass consumer ideas
put into his art as kind of an
appropriation. And people at the
time saw this as kind of similar
to what hip-hop was doing. We were using these
samples from current life
and we're putting them into our art. What time was this?
This was like mid-80s.
Jean-Michel died in 87 at the
early age of 27 from a heroin overdose.
He was a real rock star.
This is some more of his work.
He just
basically opened up books and picked
out words and put them in there. He also used
images. He was a prolific graffiti
artist in
New York City at the time.
Here's a picture of him with Warhol. They were really
good friends. They both kind of dug
on the idea of appropriation.
Some more Basquiat.
Universal up there.
This is one of my favorites of his.
I guess he really loved movies.
So, I think Universal probably
didn't sue him on this or didn't even bother.
He even put the trademark notice.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, his infatuation
with trademark and copyright is throughout
all of his stuff.
Who knows if he would have gotten away with
this now. Alright, so that's
the end of my slideshow.
Okay.
Before I kind of get off
the art kick, I'm going to talk about
a contemporary artist that's doing similar
stuff in New York City named
Cory Archangel.
Cory does some really cool
stuff with
Nintendo ROMs.
He pretty much reprograms
Nintendo ROMs to be art.
He got
one of his pieces was called
the Nintendo Clouds.
He got it into the Whitney Biennial in
2002, I believe.
It was pretty much Mario without Mario
or anything except for the clouds.
I had a picture of it.
Let me see if I can get it.
Anyway,
it was just like a Nintendo cartridge
playing the clouds
over and over and over again.
The music was playing and it was kind of a
sensation. That was all you
really saw, but it was running from a real Nintendo.
They had this whole set up in the
Whitney where there's just a Nintendo
thing sitting there.
This is just a great example of contemporary
appropriation art.
This pretty much took the New York
art scene by storm.
Cory got
pretty famous pretty quickly.
Recently in February,
he just showed
this new piece of art.
It's a 15-minute Mario movie where
Mario goes to a rave.
It's a little bit too long to play here,
but he pretty much disassembled
the entire Mario cartridge,
reprogrammed it to himself, used all the
sprites however he wanted, wrote new music.
It's an incredible use of appropriation art.
I'm going to show it now and
hope the music's not too obnoxious for
you guys.
Oh, that doesn't look good.
Okay.
So this is the intro. I'm going to fast-forward
a little bit.
So a lot of
the themes in this piece of art is that
Mario and
his images are kind of functions
of our collective memory right now.
And they're all deteriorating.
So Cory's idea is to kind of
rejuvenate them. So a lot
of themes are kind of like
this deterioration
and that these memories
are getting lost. So he uses a lot of
kind of corruption of the actual
image. And it's not that he's
not a good programmer or
didn't do it properly. It's that he wants to kind of
reinforce the idea that we're losing
the idea of Mario to
nostalgia and that kind of thing.
So I'm going to fast-forward a little bit.
This is
Mario falling. He's just done some
really neat stuff. I mean, this is like pushing
the Nintendo to its
limits.
And
there's a whole narrative
going on here. This is like Mario looking around
for stuff.
You know, this is kind of a bad part
for him.
Is this like a bad trip or something?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you'll see.
He's about to take a mushroom, I think.
So he's going to this rave
and he's on
his way there. Eventually he gets
there. He's got to go through a lot of castles
and there's a lot of jokes about the princess
because as anyone who's played Mario
knows, the princess is always
the objective.
So
it gets pretty intense. And this is all just
with 8602
assembly, which
looks like the most nasty assembly you've ever
seen. We included the code.
Yeah, if you get the CD
that Defcon hands out, you can download
the ROM and do whatever you want with it.
So this is pretty intense.
Basically
when he gets to the rave, it's just Pong.
So it's kind of a meta video game.
Right, right.
It's kind of a rave scene.
The original video game, right?
So, Cory kind of
operates in a copyright
vacuum. I mean, I've talked to him a lot about this stuff.
I mean, he just kind of
wants to make art using Mario
and that kind of thing. And it's questionable
whether or not Nintendo cares. I mean,
as far as I know, there's no official
comment from Nintendo. He has not gotten
any letters. There are no cease and desist
letters yet. I mean, in theory, it could be the Walmart
as key in promoting Super Mario Bros.
Right. But the real question
is whether or not Cory's work falls under fair
use. And
I believe it does. I mean, this is transformation.
Fair use is a whole other big debate.
I think they could have a decent
case. Yeah, I think Cory could have it.
Nintendo might have it.
The fact that he's using
Mario's image so blatantly
is really a big deal.
Especially the clouds. I think the clouds
are now one of the fair use.
So, Cory's done a lot of other really neat
hacks with video game cartridges.
One of his more abstract
ones is hacking
a Tetris cartridge so that
the timer, the internal timer
of the Nintendo slows it
down so it's like super slow Tetris.
And it takes like 10 minutes to do one line.
So you can always win.
So you can always win, yeah.
So check him out. We'll
have some links up that we can send you guys.
But
just a kind of contemporary example
of appropriation art.
Okay, so next we have a video
from Matt Bosch who
Elizabeth will talk about.
It's very similar kind of
video game art. Right, we're not
solely advocating for video game art.
I think these are two examples
of combining
technology and culture
which is something that we very much
support at our organization.
I mean, we are
talking about art and culture but I must say the main
focus of a lot of the issues that we
discuss is surrounding technology.
So
this is entitled Persistent
Artifacts by Matt Bosch.
It's currently in the New York Video Festival.
And here he's mixing a childhood
video with his first video game
called Adventure on the Atari
2600. I don't know if any of you
played it. Woohoo!
He identifies
that it's the shell of his
past identity as an
adolescent computer geek. He's actually
probably now a 20-something geek.
And he
portrays his experience and interaction
like when
he was a child playing the video and this is
his interpretation. Sorry, playing the game
of it. And you can probably
see now his image coming
through from a family home video.
This is an homage to the early
lone Atari developers, as he put it,
who created the game that shaped
many of our childhoods, but many
of whom remain unknown
as a result. Apparently the author
of Adventure,
named Warren Robinett,
refused to be forgotten
and he actually implemented one of the first
Easter eggs in this game.
Because Atari would not
credit the developers for the game,
he hid his name in a secret room
in the game, creating the
first Easter egg. You can find
the hidden signature by using a certain item
in a specific room. Unfortunately, I don't have the details.
I can try to find out.
And subsequently
he did leave Atari, but I guess
his legacy still remains in the game.
And I think this is also
in a way Matt's reaction to
how
corporations were not giving the developers credit
for their work and they were kind of
taking the hands out of the creators
and
he wanted to kind of memorialize
that as well in this
work and reflect upon his
experiences in doing so.
So, you know,
we're kind of showing all these examples of art
and that kind of thing. I mean, there are entire
genres of music
that rely on appropriation and
sampling. I mean, hip-hop is one
great example. Electronic music,
I mean, there's kind of this great
brotherhood going on with electronic music
where you can remix anything and get
away with it and nobody's going to sue you for copyright
infringement. And it's...
It depends which
fringes you get to. I mean, if you get
more poppy, it's probably more likely
that you'll get sued for copyright infringement.
But there's a great wealth of
electronic music that
can be remixed and
nobody will kind of think twice about it.
First, the genre of hip-hop
would probably not exist today
if people were
not allowed to sample and there were
such perhaps... Right.
There's a great book called Copyrights
and Copywrongs by Stephen
Vitahanathan. Who's a huge
fan of hip-hop, by the way. Right. He's a huge fan of hip-hop
and he writes this kind of history
of copyright in the context of
how it kind of gives birth to
hip-hop or lack
thereof.
How it might have prevented the birth
of hip-hop. I mean, hip-hop is predicated
upon sampling others' work, right?
Right. So,
basically,
what does
culture and what does free culture
have to say to the hacker community and
why have we showed you all this art
and that kind of thing?
The big thing that
we see, the big important part
is that
we
see culture as technology.
We see
technology as an important part
of our world, but
one that hackers
are fighting to kind of keep
open and...
Oh, I'm
sorry. We're gonna get music
up.
Okay, so we're gonna play some
music that's kind of indicative of
remix culture and that kind
of stuff in the background so you guys don't get too bored.
I'm sorry.
So,
hackers fight to kind of keep
technology open and
investigable and
they can go look and poke around and that kind of thing.
our fear is that maybe people
don't really think about how
culture works that way and
you need to have culture open and kind of
you can play around with and that
kind of thing.
This is an example.
This music in the background is the
Avalanches. They've sampled
over a thousand samples to make this record.
It's a great record called Since I Left You.
You should pick it up.
Essentially, it is a collage
of samples.
In fact, they did clear, from what I understand,
even a Madonna sample,
which is really hard to find.
Madonna cannot let you
clear a sample.
Part of the problem is the way the current system works.
It was extremely difficult
to clear all the samples. I know a lot of
releases that are delayed
or maybe they'll have to take out tracks
because it is just not possible
to do so and we feel that
we really enjoy this kind of music.
No, it may never be on the top 40.
That's fine. We're not advocating
that it should be on MTV 24-7.
Right.
A lot of people kind of think that
well, why don't you go
make music and just do whatever you want
and kind of not worry about copyright.
What if you just did that?
Why does copyright have to be
such a big deal?
Our fear as an organization is that
it's really going to sway a lot of people
who don't really want to be
illegal rebels and don't really want to
break the law to make music.
Some people are not as
radical as you might be
or we might be at Defcon and that kind of thing
and really just want to play by the rules
but if everything's kind of locked down
and there's this increasing threat
of copyright lawsuits
then they're going to be much less
encouraged to make new art.
And the hacker community really
thrives on the underground and
it's really kind of a big part
of the idea is to remain
kind of under the surface but
to the extent that
you can do that in culture, it's not
as rewarding because
culture is meant to be seen and heard.
You can post a mix anonymously online
and people can listen to it but there's
always an issue of identification.
Right, there's always going to be this problem of
how do you disseminate culture properly
and with the
really good hacks and that kind of thing
they're under the surface
and you might not even ever know about them
and that's why they're good. That's not how culture works.
So the worry
is that if you just want to
keep kind of working in the underground
and we totally like underground
and obscure music and that kind of thing
but if you want to keep avoiding the
spotlight because you're afraid of a lawsuit
that kind of thing, it's going to
really kind of short change your
mission as an artist and our goal
as an organization is to really
encourage and foster the
environment in college campuses
and hopefully on a larger scale
in the American public where
remixing and hacking
are video games and that kind of thing
is looked upon as
just the next step. It's just another tool
in the artist's kind of briefcase
of being in that kind of thing.
So, I guess I wanted to kind of
pimp
or talk about CCMixter
which is a kind of site that
Creative Commons is running.
If any of you are musicians or artists
or anybody who just likes to tinker with music
CCMixter is kind of a cool site
where you can go and set up an account
and download samples that are all CC-licensed
and you can do whatever you want with them
and put them back up and it's kind of like
a social networking. It's like the
Flickr but for music, I mean, hopefully.
The music I'm playing now
Let's Take It Back by Ashwan.
Ashwan's a great artist on there. He's done like tons of
tracks. His stuff's always awesome.
He made a track about the London
bombings maybe two or three hours
after they happened and uploaded it onto Mixter.
It's just a really great
little environment
where people can kind of
remix and not worry
about the copyright stuff.
That's one of the possible
alternatives.
Do you know what license he's using?
I think he primarily uses
non-commercial attribution
which means you can remix his stuff.
But in this case, if you're planning on
selling his music,
since you were here for the last presentation,
you're probably not okay to sell it.
So it's definitely a compromise.
It's a better
way because he gets to make
awesome music, put it online,
thousands of people, if not hundreds of
thousands of people download it every week
and it's kind of
the ideal that we want to
see happen on college campuses
is that people kind of sidestep these
problems with copyright for the
sake of creating a pool or participating
in a pool of culture that's much more
valuable and important
because it's less regulated.
And a lot of people have said, well,
more culture is not necessarily better
culture. And
of course we would advocate for everybody
to create their own works, but
it's true, not everything out there,
I mean there have been some internet phenomena
where you have some
Bulgarian guys
singing, has anybody seen this video?
Oh yeah,
it's this kid
singing, I guess
it's a
traditional Bulgarian
song or something, but it's been remixed into
techno, and it's just
kind of funny and sad and weird
at the same time. It just became an internet phenomenon
somehow, not that we're judging it.
It's up there with all your base as far as
I'm concerned, but the question is
whether or not that could happen. I mean, imagine
the poor kid got sued for making that video
when he was singing the techno remix
of a traditional song.
It's crazy. Our feeling is that
even though there might be more culture
out there with more Creative Commons licensing
and that kind of thing, the kind of
general way social networks work
and the internet works is that the best
stuff will kind of come to the top, and
CCMixter among other software packages
is really designed to encourage
people to participate and
comment and rate stuff,
and it's not just like this kind of
mass stuff that's kind of
unrated and unjustified.
You can trust your friends to recommend
that kind of thing.
This is Accufun who...
I think they also use
about 100 samples
per song. Essentially what they
do is they take really small snippets
of music and then
I'll make it louder...
mix it together
such to create
an entire song like this.
I do not know
the copyright status, but they did
clear the samples, but I'm thinking
because they're almost non-recognizable
they probably did not.
We also
have CC73
another artist using
a lot of samples, and I'd like
to say these are not mainstream artists, I mean
I don't know if you've heard of a lot of these
people, but they definitely
are getting attention in artistic circles.
And again, some people have
said, well, what if you want
all this culture to be mainstream?
I mean, isn't the point to be
underground? And if you're going
to be underground, you can still do things illegally.
But we feel that
there's a general chilling effect in society
that...
Like I was saying before, the idea that
the kind of bedroom
rocker is going to be
suppressed into not making music could be
the next John
Lennon or something. I mean, who knows
what could happen. I mean,
there's such
there's such propaganda coming
out of the content industry right now that
downloading music is illegal.
I mean, that's really the exact
text of their
you know, their losses. And if you go to CC
Mixer, you can download a lot of legal music.
As much legal music as you want.
I mean, it's endless, the amount of legal music that you
can download. So, our fear
as an organization is that there's
going to be this kind of atmosphere
of
actual fear that
you can't listen to music
that other people make
and that you can't remix it and you can't
reuse it. Just because
a corporation kind of has enough money
to send out these propaganda
campaigns
doesn't mean that
people shouldn't be kind of doing what their
artistic, you know,
sentiments would lead them to, you know.
And plus, there's a large distinction between
what was possible, say,
20, 30 years ago and what's going
on now. I mean, you know, a lot of you, I'm sure,
made mixtapes when you were younger.
Those are physical copies. You can only
distribute them to however many people you
make that copy for.
64 is the number of generations
that you can make a copy of an audio tape with
before it will be totally unlistenable.
But, it's totally different on the internet
as a copy is the
exact same thing as the original.
And some people may only intend to put something
up on their site for their friends and family, but
as we've seen with this Bulgarian
techno guy, I highly doubt he wanted, like, the whole
internet to see it. Things can be
disseminated very widely.
So, this kind of leads us
to the end of our presentation.
What do we want from
you guys? And, like, what are we
kind of talking about? What can you do to help
out? That kind of thing. I guess the number
one thing is to check out our website,
join our email list, start talking
to your friends. If you go to college, hey,
start a chapter. It's really not that hard. I did it this
year. Talk to some administration folk.
The people at your school want to see
you doing activities and that kind of thing.
They really don't think that hard
about the politics of your organization.
I mean, it depends what university you go to,
but more often than not,
you could be
talking about really radical
stuff and just still be
calling yourself some organization.
They'll give you money.
It's actually a really fun way to meet people
and start talking. The only way
we're really going to make a change is if we
kind of get enough momentum as an
organization ourselves
and kind of start doing
things, and that's with the help of you guys
and your ideas. I think you did
organize several events.
Yeah, I mean, I did a couple events.
We downloaded movies from thearchives.org
and had movie screening sessions. That's just
one idea. I know the guys at
Swarthmore did a whole remix of The Night of the Living
Dead, where it was kind of a film festival.
They did some really neat stuff with that.
I'm planning in the fall to bug
my non-graduated
friends at NYU to start a
Creative Commons kind of art show.
I mean, there's lots of stuff you can kind of come up
with and ideas. Did you bring rock star speakers as well?
No, we didn't get a chance to.
Some other chapters have also brought in speakers
on topics such as... Just get panels to your school.
Get people talking. I mean, there's
kind of a whole great
opportunity in college
to get political and active.
And the movement, the
copy left movement, and the free culture
movement has yet to really
totally solidify.
So there's a lot of opportunity for people who
might not otherwise be involved
with progressive ideas and that
kind of thing to get involved. And they don't
have to say that they wouldn't vote for
Bush. I mean, they don't have to say that they'll vote for
Kerry. Right now, it's just like
we want more sensible copyright laws.
And I think people across all party lines
can agree on that issue. I mean, I don't think it's
solely restricted to one side or another
of the political spectrum. One of the really big things
that Lawrence Lessig stresses in his book,
Free Culture, is that he advocates
a common sense approach
to copyright. And more often than not,
when there's a lawsuit involving
a teenager or a college student
in copyright, common sense is
really kind of thrown to the wayside.
And it doesn't really take a political
affiliation to realize that a lot of things
that are going on with copyright lawsuits
are destructive and
cruel.
So,
yeah,
one more thing before we close. I'm selling
this t-shirt at the
EFF booth, so if you'd like one...
Come support us. Support EFF.
Support EFF and support Free Culture.
Go purchase one. We have mediums
and larges. So,
after that, I guess we can take questions
or we'll talk to anybody who's interested
in helping out.
Yes?
Well, I think we
did make the point that we do believe
I mean, what...
What is the question? I'm sorry.
It was a comment.
Okay.
Right.
Well, I think
Western music...
The comment's talking about how...
I'm repeating the
comment.
The idea is that
music that we've been listening to the last
50 years is really just a synthesis
of a couple kind of
big... small paradigms that started
off. And not even paradigms,
but exact notes and
pieces of music. I mean, how many rock
songs from the Strokes to the Rolling
Stones have the 12-bar
blues or some variation thereof inside?
Right. And it seems now that we have
this great kind of opportunity to...
He said it was triggered by electronics and technology.
Oh, I'm sorry. I totally...
Anyway, we have this great opportunity now to push that even
farther and
take the technology and
make remixes to
really extravagant
lengths. And
the fear... you know, we're afraid
that that's going to kind of get clamped down on
by a lot of people who
kind of are living with the idea
that records and CD sales
are it to the bottom
line of culture. And
we don't feel that's the case.
Actually, could I ask a question? Were you saying that we were
under-emphasizing this point? Was that
the issue?
Well, yeah.
You're saying,
yeah, it's starting to happen with movies. You'll have
digital video cameras.
The comment
was, what is happening with music
in the last 50 years is now happening with video.
And I think
we acknowledge that. And frankly, I don't think our
organization would exist or would have existed
20 or 30 years ago
because it is the technology here that has enabled
all this production. And now
somebody can buy a digital video camera for
a couple hundred dollars. It's not going to be the
best one, but it is
enabling creation on a
grassroots level.
That is definitely something we are supporting.
We're kind of running out of time, so if anybody has any other
quick comments...
Yeah, back there.
Yeah,
we're big fans of Downhill Battle, or at
least I am. They've been doing some really
great stuff. They're coming out with some really
kind of cutting-edge
software that's going to let people share media
and push the limits
of remix culture.
And I'm very excited to see
what they kind of come out with. So,
yeah, check out our website, then check out Downhill Battle.
They're friends of ours. We actually have some
shirts for sale. Yeah, contact us if you
want some... Downhill Battle shirts that look kind
of like the DEF CON logo, as you can see.
She'll model it.
Home taping is killing the
music industry. Not the case.
It's ironic,
yes.
Right,
that was a real serious campaign back in the 80s
from what I understand, and
I think we've seen that it
back then did not kill the music industry.
In fact, people heard songs on mixtapes
and then went out and bought things
and found out about new artists that their friends
were telling them about.
So, if you guys go to college or want to get involved,
please contact us, talk to us right
afterwards. We'd love to hear from you. Or just about the general
issues. We'd always love to hear your comments.
It kind of starts from you guys
and us, so we've got to start somewhere.
So, thanks.
Thank you so much for coming to hear us.
Yeah.