As some of you may know, I founded the Georgetown University chapter of Students for Free Culture. One of the main tasks has been to raise awareness about free culture on a campus where it is little considered. This blog post, via Fred Benenson, eloquently explains why that task matters:

“There is a common assumption that light pollution affects only astronomers, and a similar assumption that copyright affects only content owners and pirates. This is obviously not the case. And while these issues are not directly observed on a day-to-day basis, they are degrading our shared commons at a rapid pace. Environmentalists, for their part, have done an exemplary job over the past two decades at making the ecological problems we face palpable, a task helped ironically by the mercurial temperament and apocalyptic manifestations of nature at large. Those in the free culture movement could work towards the same – articulating to a mainstream the need for as rich a cultural commons as we desire a natural commons. Until this is fully achieved the public domain, like darkness, will become increasingly a memory, a fabled past still in our collective conscious but no longer a true reality.”