Free Culture @ NYU

Free Culture 102: The Issues

Wednesday, 02.03.2010  –  Category: General

Continuing in the vein of my post from last semester, Free Culture 101, I thought I’d post a follow up post attempting to highlight the most significant issues implicit in the free culture movement. I know that by merely writing this list that I will be leaving some issues out, so let me emphasize that this list is not exhaustive, so please contribute your thoughts in the comments.

The free culture movement seeks:

• To advocate for copyright reform. Copyright was initially an esoteric and rarely used right by commercial publishers. It now applies automatically to any minimally creative original work for the author’s life plus 70 years. In a culture where people are constantly referencing each other and past works, this legal monopoly creates an enormous amount of friction when creating new works. How can authors be sure that their new work isn’t somehow infringing on past works? Many contemporary musicians and artists are frequently discouraged from creating new works by the threat of a hypothetical career-destroying lawsuit. Fair use is a difficult and expensive counterweight to the broad and diverse rights granted by copyright and is not a long term viable solution.
• To advocate for access to culture through technology and the Internet. Technology has given us the tools to share and spread culture easily, cheaply, and massively. We should be embracing this opportunity in every way possible. The Free Culture movement actively supports efforts like Wikipedia, Creative Commons and Linux as projects that advance this goal.
• To actively support artists and creators who are interested in pursuing and creating free culture. There are already hundreds of millions objects released under Creative Commons, licensed under the GPL and in the public domain. Creators that actively pursue careers in creating free culture and supporting themselves through other means are the most likely to survive and we should acknowledge and support them now.
• To seriously re-examine long established modes of publication and production. Incumbent media industries have a habit of sticking to their tried and true methods. For example, the fight between sheet musicians and the budding recording industry, the fight between recorded musicians and radio, the fight between the movie industry and the home video industry are all examples of where media incumbents fought viciously and unsuccessfully to destroy innovative new media from eating their lunch. The Free Culture movement actively antagonizes nostalgia for old formats and modes of distribution in favor of discovering new modes of production, business, and creation. We’re not sure what the future will hold for sustainable creative development, but we do know clinging to outdated metaphors and business models will fail as it has in the past.
• To continue the previous point: To actively fight against technologies like DRM that “nostalgize” media. Digital media functions differently from physical media and we need to seriously re-examine how we understand ideas like ownership and use. Free culture is about leveraging the potential scale of digital media, not fighting it.
• To actively support licensing and legal frameworks that encourage free culture. The GNU GPL license is one example as it enables software programmers to mandate freedom to use and share and learn from their work. Creative Commons is another one that applies to other cultural works like photos, music, and film. These licenses represent best-efforts at reforming copyright law from the outside. As more and more creators decide to release their work freely, the more the public can benefit from a pool of free culture.
• To support efforts at defining and enforcing net neutrality — Whether through market forces or regulation, enforcing net neutrality will continue to be fundamental in precipitating a free culture. If content creators cannot be sure that their work can traverse the Internet unfettered and for minimal cost, then they have less incentive to create free culture. Similarly, if the Internet becomes a variant of premium subscription television with corporately curated content constantly receiving priority over other types of content (Like Wikipedia or Creative Commons licensed music) then it will be less likely that we’ll see free culture.
• To support efforts in preserve user anonymity, privacy and autonomy. Free Culture will thrive through the use encryption and good data and privacy retention policies. Users are generating massive amounts of data about themselves and their friends online. Where does this data go? How is it used? What rights do users to have to their own data created on the sites they use? Free culture attempts to answer these questions in favor of the individual rather than the corporation. On some level these are consumer rights questions, but on another level they are human rights questions. When the majority of the planet frequently uses the Internet to communicate to one another, how do we properly police the use of their communications? These are difficult questions to answer and the Free Culture movement doesn’t intend to answer all of them, but we are interested in encouraging a rational and progressive discussion about them.

Want more? Read our (possibly dated) manifesto here.