Lessig at Launch of Freeculture.org

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Lessig to Speak at Launch of Freeculture.org
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 20:51:52 -0400
From: Nelson Pavlosky <[email protected]>
To: Seth Johnson <[email protected]>

Hey Seth,

I just wanted to send you our latest press release.  On April 23rd, the
Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons is officially launching
FreeCulture.org, an international student movement for free culture.
We're trying to get as many students from other colleges to come to the
event as possible, so we can use any and all press that you can provide
for us :-)

Thanks a bunch!
~Nelson Pavlosky~
http://scdc.sccs.swarthmore.edu

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Lessig to Speak at Launch of Freeculture.org

Students at Swarthmore College are hosting two leaders of the “free
culture” movement on Friday, April 23, to celebrate their launch of a
new international student organization dedicated to fighting coercive
copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information.

The featured speaker at the event is author and Stanford law professor
Lawrence Lessig, who represented book publisher Eric Eldred in the
groundbreaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig has been named one of
Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries for arguing “against
interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse
online.” The founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, he
is the author of Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other
Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain as well as a member of
the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community at the
University of Pennsylvania. Lessig will speak at Swarthmore in the
Science Center Lecture Hall (Room 101) at 7 p.m.

Also appearing at the Swarthmore event is the book publisher Eldred.
Since 1995, he has been the editor of Eldritch Press, a publisher of
free books on the web. The site, which generates more than 40,000 hits
per day, was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as
one of the 20 best humanities sites on the Internet. Eldred will appear
with his Internet Bookmobile, a mobile printing press that downloads
public domain books from the web and prints and binds them on the spot
for free.

Led by the group Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, the
students are launching FreeCulture.org. The group is dedicated to what
it calls a “bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture,”
which it says is under assault by the recent expansion of intellectual
property law.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information visit
http://scdc.sccs.swarthmore.edu.