I took advantage of my itinerant freelancer lifestyle to do some coding while sitting in on today's kickoff forum for Free Culture Northeastern. A general account of the forum, with linky goodness, can be found here.

I estimated 200-300 people in attendance, which packed the room. The vast majority appeared to be students, with a few staff/professorial types thrown in, and the odd straggler such as myself. I made it just in time to hear Lessig. Most of the crowd stuck around for Derek Slater, slightly less for Nelson Pavlosky, and the crowd shrunk down to maybe 1/3 its original size for the Q/A part (not bad after 100+minutes).

As a coder, I was interested to hear Lessig's argument that the Free Culture movement, among other things, should aim to support Free (vs. Open Source) software developers, since software does in fact determine policy (as explicated in Lessig's Code). Nelson had previously noted that from a consumer standpoint, cars with welded hoods are bad.

Apple was repeatedly called out for its poor behavior with regards to DRM. An example I'd never thought of: it's impossible to get media from ITMS under any kind of flexible copyright agreement. You can't get stuff available for remixing, etc.

Part of Lessig's message was clearly that DRM is wrong, and there's a huge need for students and the general public to fight it. However, insofar as we have it, it's important to architect DRM so that it allows freedom. At least, that's what I took away from his response to Mako's question (which was presented live by Mako himself).

Someone who I think was faculty at the NE business school asked about what happens to the economy if culture is all free. Lessig's response: you're thinking of the wrong kind of free. Not free as in beer, free as in liberty. Free speech doesn't mean the New York Times can't sell you a newspaper or Times Select. Nelson's response: look at web comics artists, they're producing cultural artifacts on the web and many are making a living at it, with no DRM in sight.

It'll be interesting to see if Free Culture Northeastern takes off as a going concern. Given that this was a successful and high-profile forum, the opportunity seems ripe for members of the Northwestern community to get something going.