For Immediate Release:  March 31, 2006
Contact:  Marsha Nishi Mullan     
610-328-8535      
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Student Movement FreeCulture.org to Host Summit at Swarthmore

FreeCulture.org, a fledgling international student movement founded two years ago by a pair of Swarthmore College students, will host a summit and student rally at Swarthmore on the weekend of April 21-23.  The conference is free and open to the general public, although it is targeted at student activists.  Attendees can register for the summit at http://freeculture.org/summit2006/.

Summit guests will include Free Culture author and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, Peter Decherney of the University of Pennsylvania, low-power FM experts from Prometheus Radio, Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge, and Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle. 

Participants will learn everything from campus organizing strategies to FM radio engineering.  "We're training the next wave of free culture activists and organizers who will continue to take the fight to anyone who would attempt to fence in the information commons," said FreeCulture.org co-founder and spokesperson Nelson Pavlosky.

Co-founder Luke Smith added, "FreeCulture.org is going to be a force in the copyright debate for decades to come.  This conference represents the passing of the torch to a new generation of organizers who will continue to spread the word about Free Culture."  Of the struggle over copyright, he said, "We're fighting a war in the shadows.  The decisions legislators are making now, while no one's looking, will determine our rights for the next hundred years.  Free Culture's mission is to shine a light into that darkness."

FreeCulture.org (http://freeculture.org) is an international student movement dedicated to promoting cultural participation and protecting the information commons from overly restrictive copyright, patent, and trademark law.  Swarthmore students and Free Culture founders Smith and Pavlosky successfully sued the electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems in 2003 over their illegal use of copyright to suppress information revealing flaws in their machines.  Today, FreeCulture.org chapters around the world inform students about their rights as citizens of the digital age and stakeholders in our common media culture.