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cc-lessigletter - [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #4 - Fred Benenson

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  • From: "Lawrence Lessig" <larry AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-lessigletter AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #4 - Fred Benenson
  • Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:06:53 -0800

The fourth Commoner Letter comes from Fred Benenson.

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Hi, my name is Fred Benenson. I'm a Free Culture activist,
photographer, and a graduate student at NYU. I've been involved with
CC (once as an intern, now as a fellow working for them in New York
City) for a number of years, but let me start with the free culture
student movement that I'm a part of. We're now known as Students for
Free Culture, and we're a group of students loosely organized into
chapters on university campuses around the world who are passionately
interested in consequences of the intersection of media, copyright,
the Internet and technology. While many of the actions we do are
overtly political, we do not yet have a partisan affiliation. This
makes our cause particularly viable on campuses as many people find
that the issues and values we promote are intuitive but not tainted by
partisan politics. We've done everything from street protests against
DRM to conferences on Open Access to film remix contests. Part of our
new goal is to establish free culture practices as priorities in the
academic communities of campuses.

Everything we create from our blog, to the photos we take of the
events we host, to the films we screen, is either licensed under
Creative Commons or in the public domain. For example, in 2006 my
group, Free Culture @ NYU, hosted a Creative Commons art show where
all work was released under Creative Commons licenses. This enabled
several other Free Culture chapters to re-use and remix the work to
display in their own art shows. The work was also brought into Second
Life so that another re-mixed art show could be hosted there.

I use Creative Commons licenses as examples to demonstrate that there
are proactive, positive things people can do to help shift the
rhetoric and criticism over copyright in the right direction. As a
student who frequently discusses copyright issues, I'm often asked how
I feel about file sharing and to be honest, it's a difficult question
to answer. I'm stuck between offering esoteric explanations regarding
the nature of the Internet (that it itself is a file sharing
application, so therefore I obviously endorse that kind of file
sharing), to keeping my mouth shut so that an over-zealous reporter
won't pigeonhole us as anarchist students who just want their music
for gratis. Creative Commons allows me to respond in a much more
effective way: I can say that I support file sharing so long as the
artists and musicians whose work is being shared license it under a
Creative Commons or other equally permissive license. It is in this
way that those interested in the future of free culture can then shift
the debate from a question about purely hypothetical commercial loss
to one about creators making positive decisions about how they want
their work to be shared and reused.

As I write this I'm listening to Radiohead's, "In Rainbows" and while
I'm no music critic, I know this album is tremendously influential.
Radiohead's release makes it clear that artists can release work
online, for free, while still requesting payment, and still support
themselves. In a way, this action brings us one step closer towards
realizing some of the goals of Creative Commons. By encouraging their
fans to purchase and download their music in an unencumbered digital
format for whatever price they choose, Radiohead has done something
that many in the record industry have been too scared to do all along,
something that Creative Commons is in the perfect position to promote.
Soon, I hope, many more bands will be inspired by Radiohead's actions
and realize the benefits in offering their work online.

I support CC in a number of ways. First, I'm an activist and promote
CC in the ways I've mentioned. Second, I volunteer for them whenever I
get the chance. While starting Free Culture @ NYU, I volunteered to
help CC during their first big benefit concert in New York. I've since
organized Creative Commons Salons (and birthday parties) in New York
and I routinely meet and speak to people working in culture and law in
New York about CC. This work has really accelerated in the last year
and it's fantastic to see the amount of people who are seeking out
more information about CC but also just "get" the concept right off
the bat. This previous summer, I worked with Rhizome.org to help them
integrate CC licenses into their ArtBase. This is an example of the
kind of support I'm most interested in -- offering the benefits of CC
licenses to established cultural institutions who are beginning to
understand the potential and opportunities of digital media
distribution. And lastly, I also donate when I can and how I can. I
love seeing the progress bar on CC's support site grow at the end of
every year knowing that the team will be supported for doing the
fantastic work they do.


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  • [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #4 - Fred Benenson, Lawrence Lessig, 11/26/2007

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