WK 4.2 Understanding free culture - Hanane Ben Abdeslam

The free culture movement is a growing understanding among artist and audiences that people shouldn’t have to ask permission to copy, share and use each other’s work. In free culture, you just translate the book, use the song, etc. if you want to. If the person doesn’t like the translation or the film for example, he/she is free to say so. There is plenty of free culture out there already. In the past all culture was free culture, but in today’s legal environment, the way people create free culture is to put their work out under a free license. This license was started by Lawrence Lessig, who was the first influential activist of the free culture movement and who owns the ‘Creative Commons’ organization. The creative common license is a special copyright license which explicitly allows most of the activities that standard copyrights prohibit. Free culture means you can perform it, record it, distribute it, use it in your own works, and anything else. It does not mean you can claim credit for things you didn’t do, that would just be fraud or plagiarism. 

Before reading this article, I already knew about the free culture movement and about the copyright laws, because I was taught this in school. However, what I do find interesting is that, what Lawrence Lessig has said, that copyright laws were more related to private interests than to public interests, and I also thought this.

I love the idea of a system like that working but to be honest I just can’t see how it could happen. At least I can’t see how a big company could survive under this system. By allowing anyone to copy and redistribute content, all digital media would essentially be free. Maybe small companies and individuals can make a living of donations from a tight group of fans, but companies can invest millions of dollars in development, just to give the product away. What is you thought on this?

Hanane Ben Abdeslam

What is free culture and how it can help with social development?
Free culture is not about “Giving away products”. It is about keeping culture open. For example, when Nina Paley released Sita Sings the Blues, she put the digital form of the film online for free and available to be freely used by anyone in any way. The DVD, was not given away free, the same with the merchandise. The images of Sita were free for anyone to use. But it seems that it too much of our culture in the past decade is owned by companies who just want to make money through the monopoly system.

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