ISOC-NY is proud to be a co-sponsor of 
the Students For Free Culture 2011 Conference (SFC NYC) to be held February 19th-20th 2011 at NYU. Susan Crawford and the diaspora developers will be keynote speakers.
Register here. It’s, of course, free. The Saturday will be webcast live.
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WHAT: Memefactory is a performance for anyone who uses the internet. Whether you are perplexed by pictures of cats with awful spelling or spend over 9000 hours a week surfing image boards, we promise you’ll either learn something or explode from overexposure to lulz.
Three gentlemen with three computers and three projectors take the audience on a fast-paced and whirlwind tour of every major internet meme, famous piece of internet media and more YouTube footage that we care to admit over the course of one and one half of one hour. Biologist Richard Dawkins defines as meme as a unit of cultural transmission – in the general sense a meme can be any piece of information which travels between members of culture – for us, however, memes involve funny pictures of cats and people doing silly dances.
WHEN: October 9 7:30-9:00.
WHERE: Warren Weaver Hall RM 109, http://cs.nyu.edu/web/Location/directions.html (Free and Open to the Public)
WHO: What We Know So Far http://www.whatweknowsofar.com/
WHY: Because it is not another academic lecture but lively performance filled with nothing but insight and humor for die-hard Internet memeologists and newbies alike. Take the plunge with the memefactory!
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Audio and video of Richard Stallman’s recent speech Community vs. Copyright at NYC’s Cardozo School of Law can be found here. Stallman argued that the current copyright regime is incongruous in the digital age, and no longer serves the public interest. He suggested solutions that included new classifications of works and massively reducing the protection period.
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The Internet Society’s New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) welcomes David Bollier to speak at NYU on May 18 2009. David will talk about the themes of his new book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press). The book is the first comprehensive history of the “free culture” movement and “sharing economy” that is empowering ordinary people, disrupting markets and changing politics and culture. Bollier will talk about the rise of free and open source software, Creative Commons licenses, the new forms of non-market creativity (Wikipedia, blogs, remix music, videos) as well as fascinating innovations in open science, open education and “open business models.”
When: Monday 18 May 2009 – 7pm
Where: Courant Institute
251 Mercer Street (Warren Weaver Hall)
Room 109
(entrance on W. 4th St)
The public is welcome (photo id required).
YouTomb is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The purpose of the project is to investigate what kind of videos are subject to takedown notices due to allegations of copyright infringement with particular emphasis on those for which the takedown may be mistaken. Although the initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, it is planned to extend it to other video collections. Continue reading