Follow Up: The University of Illinois Shits on Your Freedom of Speech

I just wanted to update people about the political rally that was organized yesterday in response to the University of Illinois’ “Prohibited Political Actions” memo.  Today, those of us who attended the rally reported ourselves to the University Ethics Office (as per the requirement in the memo).  I also reported myself for contacting my government representatives in May/June of this year as part of an email/phone campaign organized by the ACLU in opposition to the new FISA bill.  There was some local news coverage of the event, including this story in the Daily Illini (i recommend you read the comments too).

I also just sent an email to the local ACLU office apprising them of the situation.  Here it is, in its entirety:

I wanted to make you aware of some recent developments at the University of Illinois.  On September 18th, the University Ethics Office sent out an email regarding “prohibited political action” that was said to apply to all U of I employees.  The list included:

• Preparing for or participating in any rally or event related to a specific political candidate, party, or referendum – this includes preparation and circulation of campaign materials, petitions, or literature

• Soliciting contributions or votes on behalf of a particular political party or candidate

• Assisting at the polls on behalf of any political party, candidate, or organization

• Surveying or conducting an opinion poll related to anticipating an election outcome, or participating in a recount challenge related to an election outcome

• Running for political office

The email specified that this was a list of things that were prohibited “while working, when on University property, while using University resources (e.g., phone, fax, paper, email, etc.), or when acting as a representative of the University.”  The ambiguous language regarding the status of certain employees (particularly graduate teaching and research assistants) seems to indicate that grad students who live on campus are prohibited from these things, and there is definitely some confusion about what constitutes “working” time and “acting as a representative” in the case of graduate and faculty positions.  The email also implied that the school will not be “policing” the campuses for these policy violations, and that individuals should report themselves or others to the University Ethics Office if there is a potential violation.  They further state that any contact with a government official should be reported to the ethics office, with the caveat that political communication made on “personal” time need not be reported.  As a graduate TA, I often work from home (grading papers and communicating with students) and this is done outside of normal campus hours.  As an active ACLU member, I also have contacted government officials from home (such as during the FISA email/phone campaign earlier this year).  There is no clear dividing line between what constitutes “personal” and “work” time for my fellow TAs and faculty.  It can also be argued that, as teachers, we are the “face” of the University even while not officially in the classroom.  Regardless of whether we actively position ourselves as representatives of the University, we have no control over how our students and other individuals perceive us outside of the classroom, which leaves a very large, problematic gray area.

The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) and GEO (Graduate Employees’ Organization) have both issued statements definitively condemning the ethics policy as stated in this email.  I would be more than happy to forward you their published statements as well as a copy of the original email from the Ethics Office.  Along with these statements, several graduate TAs organized a political rally yesterday (Thursday 10/2) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in response to the policy which received some local news coverage.  Many of the faculty and graduate students in attendance (including myself) also took it upon themselves to report their attendance at the rally to the Ethics Office in accordance with the policy.

So far, there has been no response to our actions from the University, but I wanted to make sure your office was aware of the situation.  As stated before, I would be happy to provide you with more information and documentation, and I’m sure that the graduate students who organized the rally yesterday would be more than happy to speak with you further.

Thank you very much for your time, and keep up the good fight!

Sincerely,

Mark S. Barnes, Jr.

The University of Illinois Shits on Your Freedom of Speech

There’s an ongoing debate right now at the University of Illinois regarding university employees’ freedom of speech while on campus.  Recent communication from the University Ethics Office detailed several things that constituted “prohibited political activity.”  These were the listed items:

Preparing for or participating in any rally or event related to a specific political candidate, party, or referendum – this includes preparation and circulation of campaign materials, petitions, or literature

Soliciting contributions or votes on behalf of a particular political party or candidate

Assisting at the polls on behalf of any political party, candidate, or organization

Surveying or conducting an opinion poll related to anticipating an election outcome, or participating in a recount challenge related to an election outcome

Running for political office

The email also stated:

In order to ensure compliance with state and federal lobbying laws, University policy requires employees’ communications with state, federal and locally elected officials be reported to the Office of Governmental Relations.

As an active member of the ACLU, I have participated in email and phone campaigns this summer regarding a couple of different issues (not the least of which was the FISA bill that was passed near the beginning of the summer).  While I wasn’t representing the university in this capacity, the ambiguity of the language in the email from the ethics office causes me to question whether I should be reporting myself for contacting my elected representatives on those occasions.

In protest of these ethics guidelines, a group of university employees will be contacting their state representatives to complain about the ethics policy’s violation of the constitution, then report ourselves.

Rock the Vote?

I decided to update my voter registration address at a “Rock the Vote” booth at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, since I moved to Illinois from Florida last year.  After filling out the paperwork, I was told that everything was “taken care of” and I’d be getting my new voter ID card in the mail in the next few weeks.  Well, thank god I know better than to trust other people with something as important as my voting rights!

Since I hadn’t received my new card in the mail yet, I decided to stop by the Champaign County Clerk’s office to check my registration status.  Surprise!  I wasn’t on the list!  Thankfully, I came prepared with a recent utility bill and photo ID, and the clerk registered and swore me in right there.

I asked him about the missing registration forms, and he informed me that they weren’t receiving forms from some Rock the Vote and other registration events until months after the events took place.

I hope this is a cautionary tale to anyone who registered or re-registered through a middle-man or a non-government organization.  Check your shit!  Make sure you’re actually registered and do it right now!  Find the website for your local election official and contact her/him if necessary.  Your voting rights are too important to leave in the hands of anyone else!  

While I admire organizations who are attempting to register new voters, I’m deeply concerned about the fact that this paperwork is taking so long to get where it’s supposed to be!  I don’t know if this is an isolated situation or not, but either way, I feel I must reiterate: make sure you’re ready to vote in November!  Don’t wait!  You cannot register during the 28 days prior to an election, so time is running out!

Campaign Finance Bribery Over FISA?

I’ll let you be the judge of this.  According to this article, which cites campaign finance information collected by Maplight.org, 88% of the 94 Democrats who helped pass the new FISA bill last week (after previously opposing it) received an average of $8,359 in campaign funds from the telecommunication companies over the last three years.

I don’t know if it’s that simple.  All I know is that people need to call their state representatives before this bill makes it through the Senate.  If you’re a democrat, you need to make sure that your representatives know that you won’t tolerate them rolling over for the Republicans.  Let them know that you want change!  We don’t want politicians to keep wiping their asses with the constitution!

Second Life Is Stupid

OK, so I know this isn’t very new, but I had to post it up here. I feel like everything I could say about Second Life is pretty well encapsulated in this video. What I still don’t understand, though, is why so many academics get so excited about it, when it’s pretty much just them and various types of lonely sexual deviants on there. It’s like they’re trying to turn this thing that has just about been proven to not be culturally viable (the average user only ever logged in for 12 minutes and never logged back in) into something to study when there are plenty of other useful things to study. And now the government is involved, so it’s just going to become an even bigger clusterfuck.

from secondlife.reuters.c posted with vodpod

Billy Bragg Says His Piece about Royalties

I found this op-ed piece by Billy Bragg (musician) today while perusing the intarwebs. I think that he makes several very interesting but contradictory points regarding free culture that I would like to contextualize with my own previously stated ideas.

First off, I want to assert that when I talk about “free culture” I don’t mean free in a monetary sense – I mean freedom from corporate control and regulation. Corporations use the laws of supply and demand to attempt to determine the maximum amount of money anyone would be willing to pay for a specific item, then charge the same price for all similar items. The problem is that cultural objects (art, music, etc.) do not have intrinsic value – their value is determined by the response of the culture in which they are created. The value of an object is established by how much people are willing to sacrifice in order to enjoy it. That value can also be perpetuated by the opinions of well-respected people (we generally call them critics) who share those opinions with the public. In the end, the value of a particular cultural object is determined on an individual level: if you are not willing to pay $18 for the newest album by Mr. Bragg, then you don’t have to. Your refusal to buy something indicates your opinion on the value of that object. Perhaps several months later you find the same album in a used CD bin for $5, and you buy it. Once again, your decision has communicated your personal opinion on the value of that cultural object.

As Bragg points out in his op-ed, technology is not just something that has the capacity to free culture, it also has the capacity to be exploited by corporations who are smart enough not to fight it (I’m looking at you RIAA and MPAA!). The point at which I disagree with him is in regards to his comparison between radio and a band’s music appearing on a social networking site. Radio is an inherently selective medium, but social networking sites are not. If a band’s music is played regularly on the radio, it can be almost guaranteed that their song will be heard by a relatively large number of people. If a band starts a Myspace page, there’s no guarantee anyone will even look at it!

The fact is, a large part of the Internet economy works on a sort of networking “barter system.” In other words, if someone has a social networking site that has x number of users in its network, the value of that site is based on the network. Individuals and artists have the opportunity to take advantage of that network by adding themselves to it, thereby increasing the value of the network for everyone and allowing the owner of the site to rake in more ad revenue and potentially sell the site for an exorbitant amount of money. Essentially, by being part of a social network, you make use of a particular service that someone else (advertisers) pay for. I think this formula becomes problematic when people let the sites fall into corporate control (it’s like local store owners happily selling their businesses to Wal-mart so that a new “superstore” can be built), but on the other hand, I can’t really blame someone for accepting millions of dollars for something that probably didn’t take them that long to make in the first place (relatively speaking)! Based on the article, it seems that this is more the problem that Bragg is decrying, and I agree with him ideologically; however, I disagree with his statement that the owner of the networking site he mentions owes the artists a cut of what he made off of the site. It’s a nice thought, but the problem is that every user of a social networking site is like a customer. Even bands (I should probably clarify by saying “good” bands) are customers who are making use of the site’s network. If someone sells their business in the physical world (vs. online), do their customers get a cut of the profit?

I respect Billy Bragg as a musician and gladly support his art, but there’s an inherent contradiction in his statements: he plays the morality card in reference to Bebo.com sharing profits with musicians on the site (a blatantly socialist statement), while taking a very capitalist stance regarding music. He fails to consider the fact that Bebo.com is someone else’s “intellectual property.” If it is morally right for the owners of Bebo.com to share the wealth when they capitalize on their intellectual property, then shouldn’t the same be true for artists? If, as I stated before, the value of art is external and culturally-based, don’t popular musicians owe their critics, their fans, and anyone else who supports them for helping establish the value of their art?

There’s a lot to think about here, and I’d of course be interested in hearing how Mr. Bragg would respond. In the meantime, I will side with him in encouraging people to spend some money and support independent artists. Go to an art show, go to a local performance (play, concert, dance), go to an art theater, buy an independently published album or film, donate to the open-source movement, etc. Remember that your decision to consume these things helps to establish their cultural value.

ADDENDUM: I just wanted to add one more quick thought.  If you consider the nature of new media, royalties are actually extremely difficult to assess.  The idea of paying an artist royalties every time her/his music is played publicly worked well because media was difficult to duplicate.  Now, not only is media infinitely duplicable, but it is also possible to have thousands of people streaming the same audio file at once.  This makes the whole idea of royalty-based pay more and more implausible.  This is part of the problem with the current state of the music industry – their entire economic system has been undercut by the technological advances over the last decade.  Rather than fighting to maintain the viability of a pay system that has become outdated, artists should be striving for something new to match the needs of the culture.  As I’ve stated before, artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Chuck D, etc. have all made positive moves in this direction.  This is what the industry needs to focus on; and by industry, I don’t mean conglomerate corporations – I mean the artists.

Putting My Money Where My (Big) Mouth Is…

I decided today to become an official member of both the EFF and the ACLU and to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.  As I’ve stated many times in this blog, I’m an avid supporter of free expression and free culture, and I believe that it would be remiss of me to not offer financial support to two of the biggest organizations that are fighting for those rights.

Of course, being an underpaid graduate TA doesn’t give me much financial wiggle room, so I won’t be able to donate regularly until I’m a little more financially secure.  Until then, I’ll continue to use this blog as a platform for free expression and free culture.

A Small Victory in the Fight Against Illegal Surveillance

The EFF secured a minor victory last week in Congress with the passing of a new surveillance bill that does not grant retroactive immunity to telecoms who participated in the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping.  Of course, the bill still needs to go through the Senate, and veto-happy Bush has sworn that any bill that doesn’t grant immunity will not cross his desk.  Read the rest of the article here.

Anonymous Blogger vs. Ignorant Police Department

I read this article today while perusing Fark.  There’s so much I could say about this, but I think the article speaks for itself.  I would like to point out the involvement of the EFF and ACLU here (as mentioned in the article).  I think that my biggest concern here has to do with the fact that the police department diverted government resources (i.e. tax dollars) in order to treat someone like a criminal for nothing more than exercising his constitutional right to free speech.  Although our officials seem to have forgotten this, we all have the right to criticize our government, either openly or anonymously.

So many of our rights as Americans are founded on freedom of speech.  I applaud “John Adams” and others who use that right to bring injustices to light and (hopefully) effect some positive change.

Free Culture

A colleague here at the University of Illinois pointed me in the direction of this presentation by Lawrence Lessig (professor at Stanford Law) from the 2002 Open Source Conference (OSCON).  In this presentation, Lessig makes the same arguments I’ve been trying to make on this website regarding intellectual property, copyright law, and the advancement of culture.

One of his most interesting points here relates to the hypocrisy of some of the corporations that are the most dogged defenders of copyright and intellectual property law.  Lessig calls out the Walt Disney Corporation, Microsoft, and various politicians and lobbyists in the presentation.  The picture he paints is one of corporate greed and a consolidated attempt by small groups of wealthy people to maintain a stranglehold on cultural and technological advancement in order to amass more wealth for themselves.  In my opinion, this is the ultimate perversion of capitalism and the “free” market economy.

In my Blogroll, I’ve included a link to Lessig’s original presentation (including an audio recording, a flash version of his powerpoint presentation, a full transcript, and various other goodies) as well as a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is a group dedicated to the protection of freedom of expression and culture in the information age.  I encourage everyone to read more about this issue and form your own opinion.