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BY JACK KEEFE

In print | April 12, 2007

The Hold Steady performed back in March to largely rave reviews from music-lovers and partygoers alike. As a smaller-scale band, the Hold Steady’s music may be difficult to track down for students accustomed to acquiring albums from mainstream music purchasing venues.

However, thanks to some careful coordination between Olde Club, Free Culture and the band itself, if you look hard enough on the Swarthmore network, you may find live recordings from this very performance and others at Olde Club available for the first time. After a period of partial inactivity, the Swarthmore branch of Free Culture appears to be back in full swing with a host of new projects aimed at promoting the creative and informational freedoms and access available to Swarthmore students, including access to these and other recordings online.

The fundamental philosophy of the organization, according to President Eric Astor ’09, involves the democratization of digital and informational technology and resources.

The group’s motto is “to build upon,” explained as referring to the ability of individuals to use previously created works and knowledge to produce something new.

“We’re about trying to make sure students have the freedom to create and to find what’s been created,” Astor said. “Ideally, to be able to take what’s been created and to use that as fuel for [your] own creativity.”

Much of Free Culture’s goals center on the advancement of fair use policies that allow certain uses of copyrighted material for purposes such as scholarship or satire.

“, publishers of the quotes [used in reviews] could suppress bad reviews by refusing to license quotes. How do you make a social commentary in this day and age without referencing in the public consciousness through news organizations, et cetera?” Astor said as an example.

This semester, one of the most prominent initiatives on campus has been the aforementioned push to record and subsequently provide the work of any musicians playing at Olde Club who agree to let the recordings be distributed.

As a part of this process, Free Culture worked with current Olde Club director Jason Horwitz ’07 to purchase a digital microphone to replace the old analog input and allow easy recording of performances.

According to Free Culture member Ben Mazer ’10, who spearheaded the process, Free Culture is currently in discussion with the Swarthmore College Computing Society to create a media server to host these recordings and other free digital media available to the school, including performance recordings made in the Lang Concert Hall if copyright issues can be overcome.

Other opportunities available include the potential for student performers to have a free recording space in Olde Club. “Olde Club right now has the ability to do completely professional recording, so we’re working with student bands right now to record their albums,” Mazer said.

“If they want to make it free, or if they want to sell it, that’s fine too. Basically, we have a really great music scene up here, they’re just not exposed enough,” Mazer said.

Nonetheless, current issues with the recording process, according to Olde Club technical crewmember Patrick Kolodgy ’09, include isolation of individual tracks.

Currently bands must either “play separately from one another to a click track when recording” or play a live “basic track and overdub everything else,” Kolodgy explained.

Olde Club lacks a computer with proper mixing software to combine multiple tracks. However, Free Culture members assert that these obstacles are by no means insurmountable.

“With a couple of short walls to block the bulk of the sounds coming from each amp, we could achieve a workable scenario … I am looking into purchasing a computer with proper mixing software for Olde Club next semester,” Kolodgy said. “But as soon as we get those issues straight, we should be able to get some great sounding records.”

Another aspect of the set of music projects is an exhibit being displayed now in Underhill library detailing, among other things, Web sites where anyone can acquire free music without breaking current copyright laws. Underhill Librarian Donna Fournier views copyright and information-freedom issues as being central to her work as a librarian.

“Libraries have always been in the position of providing the greatest access to materials while still balancing our needs to work within fair use guidelines,” Fournier said.

“We as a profession try to stay informed on these issues and to see how far boundaries can be stretched. Libraries are at the forefront of the open access publishing movement both philosophically and practically as a way of addressing the high cost of journals,” Fournier said.

However, it would be misrepresentative to say that the projects sponsored by the local Free Culture branch focus exclusively on issues of music ownership. Some veer toward the sort of activism associated with the national branch, or aim to apply the philosophy of free culture to the computer world as with the unofficially sponsored “Hack-a-thons” organized here by member Nicholas LaRacuente ’10.

“A Hack-a-thon is when a bunch of people get together and take a certain amount of time and decide that they’re going to fix bugs in a piece of [Open Source Software],” LaRacuente said. Open Source Software, more or less, is code made explicitly available under a license that allows other users apart from the initial coders to update and improve the software in a public, usually collaborative form.

Projects worked on this semester include coding for the One Laptop Per Child organization, a non-profit organization that seeks to develop inexpensive laptop technology and software to be distributed to children worldwide who would otherwise be unable to access computers.

“Proprietary software is always explicitly owned by someone, whereas Open Source software is always community-owned … this has some immediate consequence as Open Source is usually free and proprietary is occasionally free,” LaRacuente said.

“In a way, that relates to the mission of Free Culture … it’s to allow everyone to have a part in the culture, and allow people to create content, whether it’s software, music, or whatever, without going through the barriers set up to obtain tools for it,” LaRacuente said.

Meetings for Free Culture typically run every other Thursday, though Astor advises that those interested in either the organization or the individual projects contact him or any other member, or join the mailing list for exact information.

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