Richard Todd Sexglasses, friend of our chapter, is interviewing various local and underground musicians about various issues relating to the free culture community. The topics include file sharing, sampling, cover songs, “bootleg” copies, and other issues, and how they feel it affects them and their music. The interviews are up on our university’s radio station’s (WUVT) Web site, as part of the WOOVE.

Here are the interviews so far:

Dead Western
Justin Duerr of Northern Liberties
Matt Garfield (no relation to this poster) of Mose Giganticus
Chris Johnson of Ghost Mice

More should surface over the summer.

Remix artist Girl Talk is coming to Virginia Tech, sponsored by the Virginia Tech Union.

• Date: Thursday, February 26th
• Time: 7:30pm
• Place Squires Commonwealth

As of January 29th, the URL that originally hosted the Blackboard portal now hosts a new portal that allows everyone to log in to the new Scholar platform. Right now Scholar is only being used for student projects and faculty “Short Courses,” but I have talked with a Scholar developer and he says that Blackboard is planned to be phased out within two years. The old Blackboard portal has been relocated from https://learn.vt.edu/ to https://blackboard.lt.vt.edu/.

Yesterday, skyfaller (Nelson) brought to my attention that Virginia Tech has a new student journal called Public Knowledge, which promises to use CC-BY for its articles:

Authors retain copyright of their submissions and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

The journal’s copyright page also says that submissions are non-exclusive, so publications in other journals are allowed as well, provided that they are published in Public Knowledge first:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

This was mentioned in Free Culture News a while ago, but it’s worth mentioning here because it applies specifically to Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech, after years of using the proprietary Blackboard software, is now working on their own implementation of Sakai called Scholar. Scholar right now is accessible to anyone with a Virginia Tech PID, and hopefully will be set to completely replace Blackboard in the future.

Thanks to kiran for bringing this up.

In honor of Software Freedom Day, we’re posting up the digital recording of Richard Stallman’s speech: “Copyright vs. Community” on our Web site. As per Stallman’s request, we are presenting the speech in the free Speex codec. This speech is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 Unported.

Enjoy.

Richard Stallman: Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks.

PS: Right-click and choose “Save Link As…” to download the file, or stream it with a Speex-compatible media player.

Gobblerfest was a blast.  A lot of people seemed interested, and we even got the DJ to play Brad Sucks.

Check out the pictures that Patrick took: http://killertux.org/~pbutler/people/

Free Culture News is a project of Students for Free Culture, but it was initiated by and is largely maintained by our chapter.  It is starting to gain ground, and I’ve even seen Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons) make a comment about it.

Regular meetings have been scheduled for Tuesday at 7:00 in Torgersen 3180, starting on September 2nd.

Check out the meeting wiki.

The first meeting of the semester will be held on Monday night. (This will not necessarily be the regular time)

• Date: Monday, Aug 25th
• Time: 8:00pm
• Place Torgersen 3180

See you there!