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Free Culture movement
 
 
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The free culture movement is a social movement
Social movement

Social movements are a type of Group action . They are large wiktionary:informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific politics or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....
 that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works
Creative work

A creative work is a tangible manifestation of creative effort such as literature, music, paintings, and software. Creative works have in common a degree of arbitrariness, such that it is improbable that two people would independently create the same work....
, using the Internet
Internet

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers, enabling users to share information along multiple channels. Typically, a computer that connects to the Internet can access information from a vast array of available server and other computers by moving information from them to the computer's local memory....
 as well as other media.

The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright
Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain....
 laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright
Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain....
 and intellectual property
Intellectual property

Intellectual property are law property over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; ideas, discoveries and inventions; and words, phra...
, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity
Creativity

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts....
. They call this system "permission culture
Permission culture

Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased....
".

Organizations
The organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons
Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
 (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is an United States Academia and political activist. He is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and will soon re-join the faculty at Harvard Law School....
.






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Encyclopedia


The free culture movement is a social movement
Social movement

Social movements are a type of Group action . They are large wiktionary:informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific politics or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....
 that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works
Creative work

A creative work is a tangible manifestation of creative effort such as literature, music, paintings, and software. Creative works have in common a degree of arbitrariness, such that it is improbable that two people would independently create the same work....
, using the Internet
Internet

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers, enabling users to share information along multiple channels. Typically, a computer that connects to the Internet can access information from a vast array of available server and other computers by moving information from them to the computer's local memory....
 as well as other media.

The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright
Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain....
 laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright
Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain....
 and intellectual property
Intellectual property

Intellectual property are law property over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; ideas, discoveries and inventions; and words, phra...
, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity
Creativity

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts....
. They call this system "permission culture
Permission culture

Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased....
".

Organizations


The organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons
Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
 (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is an United States Academia and political activist. He is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and will soon re-join the faculty at Harvard Law School....
. Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University
Stanford University

Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private university research university located in Stanford, California, California, United States....
 and a prominent figure in the free software movement. He wrote a book called Free Culture
Free Culture (book)

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004....
, 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
Free software movement

The free software movement is a social movement which aims to promote user's rights to access and modify software. The alternative terms for free software "libre software", "open source", and "FOSS" are associated with the free software movement....
 and extends them from the field of software
Computer software

Computer software, or just software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, Algorithm and Software documentation that perform some tasks on a computer system....
 to all cultural
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 and creative works. Early in Creative Commons
Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
' life, Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman , often abbreviated "rms","'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman...
 (founder of the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to distribute and modify computer software without restriction....
 and the free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 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
Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
 retired those licenses.

Defining Freedom


Within the free culture movement, the Creative Commons
Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
 has been criticized for lacking standard 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. The NonCommercial provision on some Creative Commons licenses remains the most controversial within the free culture movement.

Criticism


Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen

File:OEB2007 Andrew Keen.jpgAndrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur, author, and critic of the Internet....
 criticizes some of the Free Culture ideas in his book, Cult of the Amateur, describing Free Culture proponent Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is an United States Academia and political activist. He is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and will soon re-join the faculty at Harvard Law School....
 as an "intellectual property communist".

See also

  • Copyleft
    Copyleft

    File:Copyleft.svgCopyleft is a Word play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions....
  • Free software movement
    Free software movement

    The free software movement is a social movement which aims to promote user's rights to access and modify software. The alternative terms for free software "libre software", "open source", and "FOSS" are associated with the free software movement....
  • Free content
    Free content

    Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, Work of art, or other creative Content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions of and works derived from the content....
  • Cultural environmentalism
    Cultural environmentalism

    Cultural environmentalism refers to the movement that seeks to protect the public domain.It was coined by James Boyle , professor at Duke University and contributor to the Financial Times , ....
  • Students for Free Culture
  • Open educational resources
    Open educational resources

    Open educational resources are an Internet empowered worldwide community effort to create an education commons.The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation....
  • Gratis versus Libre (free as in freedom)
    Gratis versus Libre

    Gratis versus libre is the distinction between "for zero price" and "freedom" . wiktionary:gratis appears in many English dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary....
  • Open content
    Open content

    Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with "open source", describes any kind of creative work published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual....
  • Libre knowledge
    Libre knowledge

    Libre Knowledge is knowledge which may be acquired, interpreted and applied freely, it can be re-formulated according to one's needs, and shared with others for community benefit....


External links


Resources:
  • Videoblog: (Interviews with Kloschi (Freifunk
    Freifunk

    File:Freifunk logo.gifFreifunk.net is a non commercial open initiative to support free radio networks in the German region. Freifunk.net is part of the international movement for free and wireless radio networks....
    ), Kurt Jansson
    German Wikipedia

    The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia. It is the second largest Wikipedia, after the English Wikipedia, and was one of the first to be created....
     (Wikimedia
    Wikimedia Foundation

    File:Edit 01-12-09 small.oggThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based....
    ), Jürgen Neumann (Freifunk
    Freifunk

    File:Freifunk logo.gifFreifunk.net is a non commercial open initiative to support free radio networks in the German region. Freifunk.net is part of the international movement for free and wireless radio networks....
    ), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
    Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

    Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is an Open Source Initiative board member. Amongst other things, he is Founding International and Managing Editor of peer-reviewed journal First Monday , and Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT....
     (United Nations University
    United Nations University

    The a United Nations agency, is a think tank for the United Nations and the member states established in Tokyo in 1973 to "research into the pressing global problems of human survival, development and welfare that are the concern of the United Nations and its agencies"....
    ), Lawrence Lessig
    Lawrence Lessig

    Lawrence Lessig is an United States Academia and political activist. He is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and will soon re-join the faculty at Harvard Law School....
     (Creative Commons
    Creative Commons

    Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creativity works available for others to build upon legally and to share....
    ) and Allison and Benoit (Montréal Wireless))


Organisations:
  • is a project of building and promoting a free culture community online.