Free Culture movement

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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, using the Internet as well as other media.

The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely reject the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".^[1]

1 Organizations
2 Criticism
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Organizations

The organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University and a prominent figure in the free software movement. He wrote a book called Free Culture, which provides many arguments in favor of the free culture movement.

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 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 (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^[2] and later restored some support when Creative Commons retired those licenses.

[edit] Criticism

Matteo Pasquinelli (2008) criticizes the "ideology of Free Culture" or freeculturalism as a cultural implementation of "code fetishism" (i.e. software culture) and tracks its complicity with the neoliberal discourse and the forms of economic rent on immaterial assets and digital infrastructures.

Andrew Keen criticizes some of the Free Culture ideas in his book, Cult of the Amateur, describing Free Culture proponent Lawrence Lessig as an "intellectual property communist".^[3]