This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Free Culture 2008, hosted by Students for Free Culture (an organization whose Georgetown chapter I started last semester). The organizers did a great job bringing together a wide array of participants for a fun, informative weekend.

Saturday was a traditional conference (here’s the schedule) with keynotes by Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law and Creative Commons founder), Pam Samuelson (Berkeley Law) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla).

Lessig, the intellectual force behind this movement spoke briefly of his new book (Remix), his new campaign (Change Congress) and his vision for the movement which sprung up around his work on copyright in the digital age. Importantly, he encouraged Students for Free Culture to “pick fights” by which he meant find the issues that really matter and on which we can exert influence and to do so. Fortunately, the group was up to the challenge and you’ll be hearing more about it soon. John Lilly spoke about the future of Firefox (mobile), the importance of community and the elephant in the room - Google’s Chrome. Samuelson spoke (cagely, in my opinion) about her concerted effort to reform copyright from the inside and floated a number of ideas including institutional changes to the Copyright Office (a public interest ombudsmen?) to judicial overhauls (a small-claims court for personal infringers?).

There were also a number of panels including ones on Remix Culture, Politics and Transparency, Copyright and Technology, and Access to Knowledge/Medicine.

The remix discussion was a fun opening act with explanations of the history of musical mash-ups, demonstrations of modern mixes, the law behind sampling and how the same remix ethic can be expanded to other fields.

Politics and Transparency showed how the Internet was used to great benefit by the Ron Paul campaign and how citizens can get access to more information than ever and do useful things with it.

The rock star panel, in my opinion, was the Copyright and Technology which featured representatives of EFF, Berkeley Law and iSchool and Google Public Policy. They discussed the current status of copyright law and the potential challenges that can be made to expand fair use and limit the draconian features of current intellectual property law.

Finally, a panel that Tim Hwang and I helped to organize, Access to Knowledge/Medicine, took place. Berkeley Law Professor Amy Kapczynski started by providing a brilliant framework for uniting the access to knowledge and free culture movements. She was followed by Ethan Guillen, the Executive Director of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines who explained how student groups can influence universities and benefit the goals of social justice. Next, Michael Eisen, the co-founder of PLoS made an impassioned speech in support of open access (and, by the way, it’s Open Access Day). Finally, Eddan Katz of EFF explained the importance of access to knowledge and how international efforts are seeking to control access in industrial manners where a lucky few limit mass access.

I missed the party Saturday night because I was overwhelmingly tired, but the next day was an unconference which was amazing. I’ll have more to say about it in a bit, but the participants, both students and supporters, came together to establish a strong goal for the next year, and I’m excited to pursue it nationally and at Georgetown.

[Photos courtesy of Mike Linksvayer, Kevin Driscoll, and Hani Morsi]