Free culture movement

1 Background
2 Organizations
3 Defining freedom
4 Criticism
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

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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 by using the Internet and other forms of media.

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

Creative Commons is a well-known website which lists licenses that permit free sharing under various conditions. Creative Commons, which was started by Lawrence Lessig, 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 free software means free as in “free speech,” not “free beer.”

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 free culture movement.

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 George Mason University.

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. Hundreds of millions of creative works are now licensed under CC.^{[citation needed]}

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.

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 George Mason University, and by 2008, the organization had twenty-six chapters nationwide.

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 and later restored some support when Creative Commons retired those licenses.

Defining freedom

Further information: Creative Commons licenses

Within the free culture movement, Creative Commons has been criticized for lacking standards of freedom. Thus, some within the movement only consider a few Creative Commons licenses to actually be free based on the Definition of Free Cultural Works. In February 2008, Creative Commons added an "approved for free cultural works" badge to its licenses which comply—Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. 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 pirated media content it creates, damages the arts industry and hurts economic growth.

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.

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".

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.