Free Culture Movement

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lawrence Lessig standing on a podium with a microphone, with a laptop in front of him.
Lawrence Lessig in front of a laptop that reads "free culture"

The free culture movement (engl. Free culture movement ) is a social movement , the freedom of distributing and modifying of creative works - in the sense of Free Content advertises over the Internet and other media -.

The movement objects to the highly restrictive copyright laws. Many members argue that such laws hinder creativity, so they refer to the system as a " permission culture " ( Engl. Permission culture ).

The company Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig ) supports the movement by offering free licenses (CC licenses) that allow sharing (under certain conditions). Creative Commons also offers an online search for a wide variety of CC-licensed works on their website.

The free culture movement - with its ethos of free exchange of ideas - is aligned with the free software movement . Richard Stallman , founder of the GNU Project and Free Software activist, advocates the free sharing of information. As is known, he specified that free software should be understood in the sense of free speech and not mean free (English free software means free as in "free speech," not "free beer" ).

Nowadays the term also stands for many other movements such as B. the open access -, the hacker culture - the access-to-knowledge - the open source learning - and the copyleft movement.

The term "Free Culture" was used for the first time in 2003 at the World Summit on the Information Society to present the first free license for artistic works. This event has been initiated since 2001 by the Copyleft opinion team from France. A book called " Free Culture " was also published in 2004 by Lawrence Lessig.

prehistory

In 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was passed in the United States Congress . The legislature extended copyright protection for another 20 years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright of 70 years after the creator's death. The bill was heavily lobbied by companies such as Disney and is therefore also dubbed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act".

Lawrence Lessig claims that copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge distribution and technological innovation, and that this law only targets private interests as opposed to public good. In 1998 he toured the country and gave hundreds of speeches at universities, sparking the movement. This led to the formation of the first local section of Students for Free Culture at Swarthmore College .

In 1999 he challenged the "Bono Act" by taking the case to the US Supreme Court . Despite his steadfast belief in victory, he simply quoted the text of the constitution on "limited" copyright clauses and surprisingly got only two votes against, from Judges Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens .

In 2001 Lessing initiated the Creative Commons , an alternative licensing system to the prevailing standard, in which only "some rights" and not "all rights" are reserved for the creator.

Organizations

The organization that is generally associated with free culture is Creative Commons (CC for short). CC encourages the sharing of creative works and diffuses ideas for producing cultural vitality, scientific progress and business innovations.

QuestionCopyright.org is another organization whose stated mission is: "To highlight the economic, artistic and social damage caused by distribution monopolies, and to demonstrate how freedom-based distribution is better for artists and their audiences." QuestionCopyright is probably best known for its association with artist Nina Paley , whose award-winning animation Sita Sings The Blues is considered an exceptionally successful example of free distribution (under the care of the "Sita Dissemination Project"). The organization's website contains a large number of resources, publications, and other references related to various copyright, patent, and trademark issues.

The student organization "Students for Free Culture" is sometimes referred to strangely as "the Free Culture Movement", but that is not its official name. The organization is only a subset of the whole movement. The first local chapters were founded in 1998 at Swarthmore College and by 2008 the organization had 26 chapters.

The free culture movement extends the ideals of the free software movement from the field of software to all cultural and creative works. In the early days of Creative Commons, Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation and the Free Software movement ) supported the organization. He withdrew his support when several new licenses for developing countries and for sampling were introduced. Some time later, however, he partially renewed his support when Creative Commons withdrew the aforementioned licenses.

The free music movement , a sub-group of the free culture movement, began when the network was just gaining popularity with the "free music philosophy" in the early 1994's. This work was also based on Richard Stallman's free software idea and coincided with the emerging open art and information movement. The free music philosophy took a three-pronged approach to voluntarily animating to spread unrestricted copying based on the facts that copies of recordings and compositions can be made and distributed with the ease of the Internet. Subsequently, the free music movement was used by various media such as B. Billboard , Forbes , Levi's Original Music Magazine , The Free Radical , Wired and The New York Times reported.

Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the expansion of the network and the rise of P2P and lossy compression, and despite resistance from the music industry, free music became largely a reality in the early 21st century. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons - with their free information experts like Lawrence Lessig - came up with numerous licenses that covered the most diverse tastes of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish. During this time, musicians developed models to answer the question of how they could earn their living in the internet era.

Define freedom

More information under CC licenses

In the free culture movement itself, Creative Commons was criticized for its lack of freedom standards. As a result, some in the movement consider only a few Creative Commons licenses to be really free - based on the definition of free cultural works . In February 2008, Creative Commons added a "Recognized as a Free Cultural Work" badge to their licenses. However, summaries of licenses with restrictions on commercial use or derivative works do not have special badges.

Reviews

Criticism against the free culture movement comes from copyright advocates. Rick Carnes, the president of Songwriters Guild of America , and Coley Hudgins, the executive director of arts + labs (an alliance of technology and media companies) claim that the movement - despite the free cultural movement's argument that copyright kills culture themselves and the media that create them harm the art industry and stunt economic growth.

In addition, some argue that the atmosphere of the copyright debate has changed and that the free culture movement used to defend cultural producers against societies, but now it is rather a pity for these small cultural producers. Prominent technologist and musician Jaron Lanier discusses this perspective (and several other criticisms of the free cultural movement) in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget . Lanier's concerns include the depersonalization of crowd-sourced anonymous media (such as Wikipedia) and the economic dignity of middle-class creative artists.

Andrew Keen (a web 2.0 critic ) also criticizes some of the ideas of the free culture movement in his book Cult of the Amateur . In this he describes Lessig as an "intellectual property communist".

In the news industry, some claim that free culture is to blame for the deterioration of the market. However, scholars like Clay Shirky claim that the market itself (and not free culture) is what kills the journalism industry.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ What does a free culture look like? . Students of Free Culture. Retrieved October 24, 2009.
  2. ↑ What is free culture? . Students of Free Culture. Retrieved October 24, 2009.
  3. ^ Robert S. Boynton: The Tyranny of Copyright? ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / query.nytimes.com archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The New York Times , January 25, 2004
  4. ^ Richard Stallman : Ending the War on Sharing . 2009.
  5. ^ Richard Stallman, " Open Source Misses the Point ", GNU Project , 2007
  6. ^ WSIS (2001). "PCT WORKING GROUP EVENT" ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / muguet.com
  7. ^ Quart, Alissa (2009). "Expensive Gifts" , Columbia Journalism Review , 48 (2).
  8. ↑ Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity . Penguin, New York 2004, ISBN 978-1-101-20084-1 , p. 368 (accessed 2014).
  9. ^ A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright . QuestionCopyright.org. Retrieved December 3, 2011
  10. ↑ Nina Paley at HOPE 2010 . YouTube. Retrieved December 3, 2012.
  11. ^ The Sita Sings the Blues Distribution Project . QuestionCopyright.org (September 15, 2009). Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  12. ↑ Hayes, Christopher (2009). "Mr. Lessig Goes to Washington" , Nation , Accessed on 16 June 2008
  13. ↑ interview for LinuxP2P ( Memento from February 22, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Retrieved February 6, 2006)
  14. ↑ Ram Samudrala : The Free Music Philosophy . 1994. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  15. ^ Nielsen Business Media, Inc. (Ed.): Billboard . July 18, 1998, ISSN  0006-2510 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed December 3, 2011]).
  16. ↑ Penenberg A. habías copyrightus. `` Forbes '', July 11 1997 . Forbes.com. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  17. ^ Durbach D. Short fall to freedom: The free music insurgency. Levi's Original Music Magazine, November 19, 2008 ( June 1, 2010 memento on the Internet Archive ). Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  18. ↑ Ballin M. Unfair Use. `` The Free Radical '' 47, 2001 . Freeradical.co.nz. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  19. ^ Oakes C. Recording industry goes to war against web sites. Wired, June 10 1997 . Wired.com. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  20. ^ Stutz M. They (used to) write the songs. Wired, June 12, 1998 . Freerockload.ucoz.com. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  21. ↑ Napoli L Fans of MP3 forced the issue December 16 1998 Nytimes.com Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  22. ↑ Alternate Kinds of Freedom ( Memento of September 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) by Troels Just. Troelsjust.dk. Retrieved September 3, 2014.
  23. ↑ Samudrala R. The future of music. 1997 . Ram.org. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  24. ^ Story of a Revolution: Napster & the Music Industry. `` MusicDish '', 2000 . (PDF). Retrieved December 3, 2011.
  25. ^ 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. ( Memento of the original from April 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . (PDF). Retrieved December 3, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jolt.law.harvard.edu
  26. ^ Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement . Mako.cc. Retrieved December 3, 2011
  27. ^ Definition of Free Cultural Works . Freedomdefined.org (December 1, 2008). Retrieved December 3, 2011
  28. ^ Approved for Free Cultural Works . February 20, 2008.
  29. ↑ Carnes, Rick, and Coley Hudgins (2009). "COPYRIGHT IS CRUCIAL FOR CULTURE", Billboard , 121 (31).
  30. ↑ 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

Web links

resources
Organizations