Archive:C3 Press Release

FreeCulture.org to Launch New Campaign and National Campus Chapters

August 14, 2004: FreeCulture.org, an international student movement for Free Culture, has announced their new â€œC3 Campaignâ€ to be launched this month in conjunction with the launch of Free Culture chapters on college campuses across the country.

C3, which stands for â€œCreate, Communicate, Collaborate,â€ aims to foster the creation, distribution, and revision of culture, both among individual campus groups and on a global scale using the Internet. This participatory approach to culture will be made possible and legal by registering content under Creative Content licenses; CC licenses, which ride on top  of traditional copyright, allow authors to state exactly what rights others have to their work, such as the ability to create derivative works. After licensing content under Creative Commons and allowing for derivative works, students participating in C3 can seek to distribute their creations over the internet through P2P networks and on their own campus networks. Through this constructive, legal sharing of culture, the C3 campaign hopes to underscore the substantial noninfringing uses offered by P2P networks. Once on filesharing networks, other users will be able to download the content and remix it, creating an entirely new work, and repeat the process or creating, communicating, and collaborating.

â€œThe title really sums it up,â€ says Rebekah Baglini, who is launching a Free Culture club at Bryn Mawr College this month. â€œThis isnâ€™t just about a new, more participatory approach to cultureâ€”about making connections with others on both the local and global level and harnessing the power of collaboration.â€

Quotation from Nelson

The C3 campaign will officially launch this week at Duke, U of Hawaii, and Emory. Other schools participating in the campaign include Swarthmore, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, U of Penn, Cornell, Franklin and Marshall, Columbia, Brown, and Bryn Mawr.

C3 follows a number of successful campaigns organized by Free Culture, including Barbie in a Blender (www.barbieinablender.org) and Save the iPod (www.savetheipod.org). Free Culture is an international student movement dedicated to defending a free and open cultural space and protecting public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation. Freeculture.org promotes a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, in which cultural elements are accessible to all citizens for interpretation and innovation. Freeculture.org sees opportunity in technology, opportunity to cultivate this intellectual commons, opportunity to build a culture to support and cultivate the new freedoms that we have found in the digital age.