Talk:Free Culture movement

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[edit] Free music

Free Music - hey all, this is innovati. I have noticed that the music industry seems to have some problems with copyrights and DRM, as well as public broadcast. We have the wonderful RIAA, MPAA for mainstream music and video, and organisations like CCLI for sacred music and other groups for other interests. I believe that they have long outlived their usefulness and that it is time for us content creators to release music freely, for whatever use, over the internet.

A new copyrighting system needs to be used, not cretive commons. The new system must include these points: Author, freedom to copy, freedom to publish, freedom to perform publicly, freedom to make derivative works as well as others.

Churches especially don't need to pay licencing for each song they sing - that makes every sacred service similar to the broadcast of a radio station - I see that similar to the Money changers and vendors in the temple, a story from the bible where those profiting off of religious services were called thieves.

I know the talent is out there for recorded, tracked, midi, sheet and tabbed music to be placed in a general repository, indexed and sorted by category, and I believe it's our duty to at least start by catalogueing all of the available public domain music.

Please contact innovati@gmail.com if you share this charge.

Hi innovati, welcome to Wikipedia. However please note that Wikipedia articles are not appropriate venues for discussion or advertisement. If you wish to place a notice anywhere on Wikipedia, the appropriate place would be your User page or at least this talk page. NTK 08:03, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Regarding churches paying license fees to use non-public-domain songs: a church is free at any time to use public domain songs, but if they want to use a song owned by someone else, they like anyone else must pay the owner (or other right-holder). Use without permission would be stealing, and I'm sure you don't want to see churches doing that. If a song's creator wishes to retain any control of his work, he sets down in concrete terms the license under which the work can be published, distributed, duplicated, performed, or otherwise used. --75.161.84.72 (talk) 06:48, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inaccurate

  • This article, if it is supposed to primarily refer to freeculture.org, is actually quite inaccurate. Freeculture.org, often referred to as the "Free Culture Movement" by Lessig and co., is a student-run grassroots activist organization with chapters at universities throughout the country. Freeculture.org considers itself part of the greater "free culture movement," and thus perhaps should be a subset of a page on the entire movement. Furthermore, the Wikipedia reference does not seem to be all too relevant and perhaps warrants its own page. Furthermore, the statement "The group is similar to other organizations in the free software movement such as Creative Commons and the EFF." is actually quite inaccurate in that while we may share some beliefs and work with these organizations, we are structurally very different. Creative Commons is also not an organization in the "free software movement." While Freeculture addresses issues such as free software, we also look to greater cultural issues and thus could not be solely characterized as a free software organization. Further, while the group may have been inspired by Lessig, he is in no way officially involved with the group. I would edit, but as someone who is involved with the group I felt that would be against Wikipedia norms so I felt the best course of action would be to do just this. --a fc.o member

[edit] Article problems

Should the title really be Free Culture Movement and not Free Culture movement? Movements are generally downcased. Also, the section Wikipedia strikes me as a bit effusive, and possibly a violation of WP:SELF. --maru (talk) contribs 04:48, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

That's the gist of it. If we're definiting the article as being about the general idea of Free Culture, then the WM section definitely applies. If we're defining the article as being about the college group, then it doesn't belong. Stilgar135 01:21, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] File formats

There is a Free file format article.

[edit] Can we split the articles?

FreeCulture.org forwards here, and I believe that is incorrect. FreeCulture.org is a student organization, that's the name it was incorporated under, that's its official name, and it should not be called "the free culture movement". For one thing, we don't claim to represent the entire movement, we're just a student organization. If you're talking about the movement in general, it would probably be more informative / accurate to discuss visionaries such as Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Jimbo Wales, and perhaps list other organizations such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, etc. alongside FreeCulture.org.

Can we split FreeCulture.org off into a separate article and stop confounding the entire movement with a single student organization? --Skyfaller 21:43, 6 September 2006 (UTC) (For the record, I co-founded FreeCulture.org and can provide lots of information backed by mainstream sources.)

I think this is a pretty good idea. Stilgar135 16:37, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of External Links

I removed all external links not used as references in this article. There is no need for external links to organizations since they should have their own Wikipedia entry (eg Freeculture.org). PuerExMachina 03:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I am going to revert this partially. I find the links useful. They give a background to the subject. The article is not so long yet and it is good to find other free ressources. Also not all the links are to external organisations (I leave freeculture.org out of this list) but to articles about the topic. References/Sources should be included seperately anyway. Mario Behling 09:32, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization

Should "Free Culture" be capitalized everywhere or not? — Omegatron 23:58, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia in this article

I removed the following to talk. If someone disagrees, they can revert my changes:

=== Wikimedia ===

[[Wikimedia]]'s projects, such as the popular [[Wikipedia]], which are licensed under the [[GNU Free Documentation License]] and different Creative Commons licences, arguably constitute the largest single free culture project.

Based on ideas of the free culture movement, [[Wikimedia]] founder [[Jimmy Wales]] also has announced ten challenges for the movement in general with [[meta:Transwiki:Wikimania05/Presentation-JW1|A Free Culture Manifesto]] at the [[Wikimania]] 2005.

According to Jimmy Wales, those 10 things that should be free within the next decade are:

# [[Encyclopedia]] — in all languages; [[Wikipedia]]
# [[Dictionary]] — in and for all languages; [[Wiktionary]]
# [[Curriculum]] — in every language and for every grade; [[Wikibooks]], [[Wikiversity]]
# [[Music]] — [[Wikimedia Commons]]
# [[Art]] — [[Wikimedia Commons]]
# [[Free file format]]s
# [[Map]]s — [[Wikimedia Commons]]
# [[Identifier|Product identifiers]]
# [[TV listings]]
# [[Community|Communities]]

Former board member and trustee [[Tim Shell]], however, suggests that the Wikimedia Foundation's use of free content was not meant to be an ideological position:

{{quote|For example, should we have an official position on the free culture movement? Wikimedia is part of that movement, but I would say this is so because of practical considerations, rather than ideological ones. It was assumed that people would be more willing to contribute to Wikipedia if they knew their work could not be seized and owned by someone else, and it was decided that all contributions would be licensed accordingly.<ref>{{cite web
| url = http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:TimShell
| title = Should we be value-neutral outside the scope of our essential mission?
| accessdate = 2007-09-19
| last = Shell
| first = Tim
| authorlink = Tim Shell
| date = [[2006-08-25]]
| work = Wikimedia Meta-wiki
}}</ref>}}
  1. The reason I moved this to talk is first, this is not an article about wikipedia, it is an article about another idea. Fails Wikipedia:Avoid_self-references#Writing_about Wikipedia itself
  2. Second, this section is completly unsourced, except for a chat board statment from someone unnotable. Fails: WP:Cite
  3. And third and most important, wikipedia is definitly not a "free culture" organization. How many of us on wikipedia have had our images deleted? The copyright enforcers are incredibly pushy on wikipedia, and will not allow little if any content. Jimmy Wales, with advice from his attorneys, continues to make more and more restictive decisions about what is fair use and free content. Even if the founder of wikipedia once made free content statments, the reality is that wikipedia is not free content. Examples of restricted use policies: Wikipedia:Image_use_policy; "Wikipedia has no tolerance for copyright violations in it, and we actively strive to find and remove any that we find." Wikipedia:Copyright violations Travb (talk) 08:12, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Some people consider Adobe Flash Player “free”. You only consider the complete lack of copyright “free”. Others consider FSF/OSI “free”. While I disagree with you on Wikimedia being “not free content”, I think the citation is not referenced well. --AVRS 14:13, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
I think having wikipedia in here sounds like a good idea, at least because it seems to me that wikipedia is a very well-known example of free culture. That wikipedia is a part of free culture should be pretty self-apparent from the way it's defined in the article ("social movement[s] that [promote] the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media"), and from the license used.
The self-referencing seems ok, as the text says that writing about wikipedia is ok where it's relevant. If wikipedia is an example of online free culture, then it's relevant.
As for wikipedia not using copyrighted material without permission, I don't see that as any stranger than FLOSS not gobbling up proprietary software. Free culture things are things that let you copy, distribute and modify them. Proprietary things generally don't, and so using them without permission isn't allowed, and therefore you can't include them in free culture things and have the free culture things remain free (or even legal). If you want to use copyrighted pictures and such on wikipedia, it seems to me that is to ask the owner to change the license, or at least follow fair usage guidelines. H3st (talk) 22:13, 17 November 2007 (UTC)