News: What is Free Culture? [Part II]

Monday, July 19, 2004 - 02:52 PM

Part I. What is FreeCulture.org? It was founded by the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons and Downhill Battle, with the help of organizations such as Click the Vote. So.. "What is Free Culture?" Perhaps one could begin by asking, what does a free culture look like? If you like their answers to that question, or at least find them intriguing, then maybe you'll be interested in reading their attempts at nailing down some concrete parts of a definition of free culture. Like everything else on their site, it is a work in progress... feel free to contribute! click Read more...

• Lessig's free culture - Lawrence Lessig coined the term, but how have we changed or expanded the meaning? Watch "Free Culture", a flash presentation (with mp3 audio and transcript) by Lawrence Lessig, to hear it from the man himself.

• A culture of freedom - The internet and digital technology can be tools of liberation. They have the potential to put tremendous power into the hands of the average person, if they are not perverted into a means of control. However, with great power comes great responsibility. To a large extent, free culture is about building a healthy, robust culture of freedom, where the people understand how freedom works and are comfortable with their liberty.

• Free software - A lot of our philosophy is an attempt to apply the ideology of free software and the open source model to the rest of society.

• Free speech - Free Culture is about civil liberties.

• Free markets - Free culture is about free competition, in the best sense of the term. Free culture offers you choices, rather than a single monopoly that can dictate its terms to you if you want to use any piece of modern technology. The freedom to innovate encourages the production of quality, not the crushing of competitors, as the best way to success.

• Cheap Art - Free Culture has some parallels with Bread and Puppet Theater's Cheap Art Manifesto. There are some important differences, however...

• Open access - Education is a universal good.

• Blogging - On the internet, anyone can be a publisher, and blogs offer two-way, person-to-person communication, raising the possibility of emergent democracy.

• Free networks - Communication is an essential freedom that should be available to everybody, no matter if the person is rich, poor or an inhabitant of the developing world.

• Free Culture Definition - some metrics for deciding if a cultural artifact is Free.

• Free Culture quotes - some quotes from great thinkers about Free Culture

Read the Free Culture Manifesto.
Downhill Battle's draft of a statement