October 18, 2007
Columbia’s Free Culture held a panel discussion Wednesday night in conjunction with Digital Freedom on Music, Movies and Copyright, featuring Fritz Attaway, the executive vice president of the MPAA, Ray Beckerman, a defense lawyer who represents many people sued by the recording industry, and Sherwin Siy, a representative of Public Knowledge headquartered in Washington, D.C. Musical artists also contributed to the discussion, including guitarist Kris Ricot of Velocet and recording engineer/singer-songwriter Denise Barbarita.
To a packed room in the William & June Warren Hall, the panelists discussed the necessity of current and pending copyright legislation, digital music downloads, emerging media formats, re-inventing business models for the RIAA and MPAA, DRM protected music, the effects of recent and well-known court cases. Kris Ricot and Denise Barbarita also provided insights on the differences between careers as an independent artist and one signed to a major record label, touching on the idea that the major record labels could very well become extraneous in a few years. A short Q&A with the audience followed the lively discussion.
Afterwards, Denise Barbarita played an acoustic set with the blue LCD light in the background for ambiance, which was very intimate and casual. Sherwin Siy and Ray Beckerman stuck around after the panel for the set. We really appreciated Fritz Attaway for coming, though this free culture member suspects it has something to do with Columbia topping the charts for having most MPAA copyright violations among college campuses.
Some Links:
Digital Freedom: website
Public Knowledge: website
Denise Barbarita: website | myspace
The Velocet: website | myspace
A few photos after the jump!
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October 17, 2007
Networking seminar
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 11am
CS Conference Room
Dr. Eyal Felstaine
Information Systems Engineering, Ben Gurion University
Deniability - an Alibi for Users in P2P Networks
Peer to peer file sharing is ‘booming’, but meanwhile censorship of
these networks and prosecution of users that share censored content
are growing just as quickly. In this talk, we propose a novel notion
of deniability as an easy and efficient method for users to avoid
prosecution by the censor. The fundamental concept is that a given
data element, which contains controversial or censored content, is
also associated with neutral-content. Hence, even a powerful adversary
capable of monitoring all communication in the network and viewing the
internal state of participating hosts is unable to prove a link
between censored content and a user.
Deniability is an elegant alternative to user anonymity in P2P file
sharing networks which typically requires greater overhead and do not
guarantee true server anonymity against powerful, real-world
adversaries. In our approach, the storage required for a document is
only twice as large as the document itself and the communication
overhead required to retrieve a document is bounded to four times
greater than what is needed in a standard network.
Dr. Eyal Felstaine:
Eyal is a senior staff member in the Information Systems Engineering
department in the Ben Gurion University, Israel. He heads a research
team that focuses on P2P anonymity and on various aspects of network
based content inspection and classification.
Prior to joining the Ben Gurion Faculty, Eyal was the Founder and CEO of
SANRAD, a global market leader in the field of high speed IP based
storage-networks. Eyal holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science
and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute
of Technology.
October 17, 2007
Tomorrow Wed. the 17th, at 7 pm, in William & June Warren Hall, we are proud to present a panel on copyright, the entertainment industry and you. This promises to be an awesome event, as we’ve brought in representatives from the MPAA, musicians, Public Knowledge and defense attorney Ray Beckerman. As usual we’ll have some free culture free food. So if you have something to say to the MPAA, show up and tell them.
Date: THIS Wed, Oct. 17th, 2007
Time: Begins 7:00pm
Location: William & June Warren Hall Room 417 (corner of Amsterdam Ave. and 115th St.)
Come join Free Culture and Digital Freedom for a lively talk about copyright and the entertainment industry. Panelists will include:
- Ray Beckerman, defense attorney who represented people sued by the recording industry
- Fritz Attaway, executive VP of the Motion Pictures Association of America
- Denise Barbarita, musician and recording engineer
- Sherwin Siy, representative from Public Knowledge, a Washington DC-based public interest group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture
October 05, 2007
Why pay 200 dollars + for the entire Literature Humanities CORE readings when you can download the texts for free? From Homer and Herodotus to Virgil and Dante, we got them all.
Download the Texts Here
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September 29, 2007
Your Internet activity is far from private. Columbia, outside organizations, and the government all have surprisingly easy access to what you do and say online. Whether or not you do something that requires confidentiality, using CU-LATOR demonstrates a commitment to personal privacy and protection.Unfortunately, CU-LATOR currently only supports Macs.
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September 29, 2007
Senator Barack Obama sent a letter to the chairman of the DNC (Howard Dean) expressing his support for and requesting the Democratic presidential debate video to be distributed in the public domain or under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.
A copy of the letter
September 29, 2007
As we had told you in a previous post, Barack Obama was pushing for the Democratic National Debates to be distributed in public domain or under Creative Commons.
Thanks to a flurry of letters from both sides of the aisle as well as support by key Democratic candidates, CNN has announced plans to release all presidential debate footage under Creative Commons.
Truly “We Report, You Decide”
Click Here to Check out the article