Return to News & Events

For Immediate Release: April 13, 2004
Contact: Tom Krattenmaker
610-328-8534
tkratte1@swarthmore.edu
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Students at Swarthmore College hosted a leaders of the "free culture" movement on Friday, April 23, to celebrate their launch of a new international student organization dedicated to fighting coercive copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information.

The featured speaker at the event is author and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who represented book publisher Eric Eldred in the groundbreaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig has been named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online." The founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, he is the author of Free Culture and The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain, as well as a member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community at the University of Pennsylvania. Lessig will speak at Swarthmore in the Science Center Lecture Hall (Room 101) at 7 p.m.

Led by the group Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, the students are launching FreeCulture.org. The group is dedicated to what it calls a "bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture," which it says is under assault by the recent expansion of intellectual property law.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information visit http://scdc.sccs.swarthmore.edu.