Jump to content

Free-culture movement: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
→Organizations: nationwide = US?
B2medeir (talk | contribs)
23 edits
Line 47: Line 47:


== See also ==
== See also ==
{{Refbegin|2}}

*[[2600: The Hacker Quarterly]]
*[[2600: The Hacker Quarterly]]
*[[Cultural environmentalism]]
*[[Cultural environmentalism]]
Line 62: Line 62:
*[[Hacktivism]]
*[[Hacktivism]]
*[[Hacktivismo]]
*[[Hacktivismo]]
*[[Information activist]]
*[[Information wants to be free]]
*[[Information wants to be free]]
*[[Internet censorship]]
*[[Internet censorship]]

Revision as of 15:07, 31 October 2011

Lawrence Lessig standing at a podium with a microphone, with a laptop computer in front of him.
Lawrence Lessig in front of a laptop labeled "free culture"

The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content[1][2] by using the Internet and other forms of media.

The movement objects to over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".[3]

Creative Commons is a well-known website which was started by Lawrence Lessig. It lists licenses that permit free sharing under various conditions, and also offers an online search of various creative-commons-licensed productions.

The free culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas, is of a whole with the free software movement. Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project, and free software activist, advocates free sharing of information. He famously stated that free software means free as in “free speech,” not “free beer.”[4]

Today, the term stands for many other movements, including hacker computing, the access to knowledge movement and the copyleft movement.

The term “free culture” was originally the title of a 2004 book by Lawrence Lessig, a founding father of the free culture movement.[5]

Background

In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which President Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy years after a creator’s death. The bill was heavily lobbied by corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production and technological innovation, and that private interests - as opposed to public good - determine law. He travelled the country in 1998, giving as many as a hundred speeches a year at college campuses, and sparked the movement. It led to the foundation of the first chapter of the Students for Free Culture at Swarthmore College.

In 1999, Lessig challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution’s plain language about “limited” copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes; from Justices Stevens and Breyer.

In 2001, Lessig initiated Creative Commons, an alternative “some rights reserved” licensing system to the default “all rights reserved” copyright system.

Organizations

The organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig. CC promotes sharing creative works and diffusing ideas to produce cultural vibrance, scientific progress and business innovation.

QuestionCopyright.org is another organization whose stated mission is: "to highlight the economic, artistic, and social harm caused by distribution monopolies, and to demonstrate how freedom-based distribution is better for artists and audiences."[6] QuestionCopyright may be best known for its association with artist Nina Paley, whose multi-award winning feature length animation Sita Sings The Blues has been held up as an extraordinarily successful[7] example of free distribution under the aegis of the "Sita Distribution Project".[8] The web site of the organization has a number of resources, publications, and other references related to various copyright, patent, and trademark issues.

The student organization Students for Free Culture is sometimes confusingly called "the Free Culture Movement", but that is not its official name. The organization is a subset of the greater movement. The first chapter was founded in 1998 at Swarthmore College, and by 2008, the organization had twenty-six chapters nationwide (US?).[9]

The free culture movement takes the ideals of the free software movement and extends them from the field of software to all cultural and creative works. Early in Creative Commons' life, Richard Stallman (the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the free software movement) supported the organization. He withdrew his support due to the introduction of several licenses including a developing nations and the sampling licenses[10] and later restored some support when Creative Commons retired those licenses.

The Free Music movement, a subset of the free culture movement, started out just as the Web rose in popularity with the Free Music Philosophy[11] by Ram Samudrala in early 1994. It was also based on the idea of Free Software by Richard Stallman and coincided with nascent open art and open information movements (referred to here as collectively as the "free culture movement"). The Free Music Philosophy used a three pronged approach to voluntarily encourage the spread of unrestricted copying, based on the fact that copies of recordings and compositions could be made and distributed with complete accuracy and ease via the Internet. The subsequent Free Music Movement was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard,[12] Forbes,[13] Levi's Original Music Magazine,[14] The Free Radical,[15] Wired[16][17] and The New York Times.[18] Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of P2P, the cementing of mp3 as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century.[19] Organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.[20][21][22]

Defining freedom

Further information: Creative Commons licenses

Within the free culture movement, Creative Commons has been criticized for lacking standards of freedom.[23] Thus, some within the movement only consider a few Creative Commons licenses to actually be free based on the Definition of Free Cultural Works.[24] In February 2008, Creative Commons added an "approved for free cultural works" badge to its licenses which comply—Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike.[25] Summaries of the licenses with restrictions on commercial use or derivative works do not have any special marks.

Criticism

The most vocal criticism against the free culture movement comes from copyright proponents. Rick Carnes, the president of the Songwriters Guild of America, and Coley Hudgins, the executive director of arts+labs, an alliance of technology and media companies, claim that despite the free culture movement’s argument that copyright is “killing culture”, the movement itself, and the media it creates, damages the arts industry and hurts economic growth.[26]

In addition, some argue that the atmosphere of the copyright debate has changed. Free culture may have once defended culture producers against corporations. But now free culture may hurt smaller culture producers, cf. the “HOPE” poster controversy, when the designer Shepard Fairey appropriated Mannie Garcia’s artwork into his own while failing to provide attribution.[5]

Andrew Keen, a critic of Web 2.0, criticizes some of the Free Culture ideas in his book, Cult of the Amateur, describing Lessig as an "intellectual property communist".[27]

In the news media industry, some blame free culture as the cause behind the decline of its market. However, scholars like Clay Shirky claim that the market itself, not free culture, is what is killing the journalism industry.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ "What does a free culture look like?". Students of Free culture. Retrieved 2009-10-24.
  2. ^ "What is free culture?". Students of Free culture. Retrieved 2009-10-24.
  3. ^ Robert S. Boynton: The Tyranny of Copyright? The New York Times, January 25, 2004
  4. ^ Richard Stallman: "Open Source Misses the Point", GNU project, 2007
  5. ^ a b c Quart, Alissa (2009). "Expensive Gifts", Columbia Journalism Review, 48(2).
  6. ^ http://questioncopyright.org/
  7. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n04IeQo4RCQ
  8. ^ http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution
  9. ^ Hayes, Christopher (2009). "Mr. Lessig Goes to Washington", Nation, 286(23).
  10. ^ interview for LinuxP2P (6 february 2006)
  11. ^ Samudrala, Ram (1994). "The Free Music Philosophy". Retrieved 2008-10-26.
  12. ^ Reece D. Industry grapples with MP3 dilemma. Billboard, July 18 1998.
  13. ^ Penenberg A. Habias copyrightus. Forbes, July 11 1997.
  14. ^ Durbach D. Short fall to freedom: The free music insurgency. Levi's Original Music Magazine, November 19, 2008
  15. ^ Ballin M. Unfair Use. The Free Radical 47, 2001
  16. ^ Oakes C. Recording industry goes to war against web sites. Wired, June 10 1997.
  17. ^ Stutz M. They (used to) write the songs. Wired, June 12 1998.
  18. ^ Napoli L. Fans of MP3 forced the issue. The New York Times, December 16 1998.
  19. ^ Just T. Alternate Kinds of Freedom.
  20. ^ Schulman BM. The song heard 'round the world: The copyright implications of MP3s and the future of digital music. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 12: 3, 1999.
  21. ^ Samudrala R. The future of music. 1997
  22. ^ Story of a Revolution: Napster & the Music Industry. MusicDish, 2000
  23. ^ "Towards A Standard Of Freedom".
  24. ^ "Definition of Free Cultural Works".
  25. ^ "Approved for Free Cultural Works". 2008-02-20.
  26. ^ Carnes, Rick, and Coley Hudgins (2009). "COPYRIGHT IS CRUCIAL FOR CULTURE", Billboard, 121(31).
  27. ^ Keen, Andrew (May 16, 2006). Web 2.0; The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think. The Weekly Standard
Wikiversity has learning resources about Free-culture movement
Resources
Organisations
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Free-culture_movement&oldid=458306273"