Free-culture movement

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, and objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity. Closely associated with the free culture movement are organizations in the free software movement, such as the Free Software Foundation.

Another 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 FreeCulture.org is sometimes confusingly called "the Free Culture Movement," but that is not its official name. The organization is a subset of the greater movement.

Wikimedia

Wikimedia's projects, which are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and different Creative Commons licences arguably constitute the largest single free culture project. Wikimedia was founded by Jimmy Wales. Based on ideas of the free culture movement, Jimmy Wales also has announced ten challenges for the movement in general with A Free Culture Manifesto at the Wikimania 2005.

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

1. Encyclopedia – in all languages; Wikipedia
2. Dictionary – in and for all languages; Wiktionary
3. Curriculum – in every language and for every grade; Wikibooks, Wikiversity
4. Music
5. Art
6. Free file formats
7. Maps
8. Product identifiers
9. TV listings
10. Communities

See Also

• Cultural environmentalism
• FreeCulture.org

External links

Resources

• Berry, David M. and Giles Moss. 2006. The Politics of the Libre Commons. First Monday. Volume 11 (September)
• Videoblog: Free Culture, Free Software, Free Infrastructures! Openness and Freedom in every Layer of the Network (Interviews with Kloschi (Freifunk), Kurt Jansson (Wikimedia), Jürgen Neumann (Freifunk), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (United Nations University), Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons) and Allison and Benoit (Montréal Wireless))

Organisations

• Free Culture Foundation work to promote the free culture movement, and to foster debate about the meaning of cultural freedom
• Libervis.com is a project of building and promoting a free culture community online.