Free Culture

Probably will become a general term for geek-initiated reform of thinking and law protecting and expanding the public's use of material that governments grant semi-exclusive use to (through copyright, patent, etc.).

FreeOpenSoftware is for software, this broadens/joins the movement.

In the UnitedStates, copyright was originally 14 years, extensible another 14, and required registration. Now, anything published is immediately granted copyright, and it lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years for works that are legally authored by corporations - also see CorporatePersonhood).

On a gut level, my biggest objection to these expanded terms is that i believe it is socially healthy for us individually and collectively to be able to remix our culture - to retell and update old stories and cultural creations of all kinds.

With the ease of perfect reproduction technology brings, the ability of a musician, artist, storyteller or writer to earn a living from their craft is diminished. To me, twenty-eight years seems plenty sufficient for them to make some money from their work. I imagine the net will continue to develop distribution mechanisms which leave more of the customer's money in their hands. But the real upside is, technology has made new kinds of artwork possible. Imagine if you were free to MashUp all music, cut and paste all novels and short stories and films from 1978 and earlier? What else could technology catalyze? Free the culture!

Besides generally informing ourselves and others, the movement attempts to change law through legislation and/or appeals to constitutionality to shorten copyright terms and generally make more works available for reuse. Another major stream develops and protects licenses that allow people to release their work under more open terms than "All rights reserved", and encourages them to do so.

There's also of course the artists, satirists, experimenters and other folk who take up all this material, legally or illegally, and with the coders create the landscape we are all now attempting to negotiate.

LawrenceLessig? is a lawyer who has raised the profile of this issue considerably, through:

talks (1999-2002 - see http://www.lessig.org/freeculture/ )
a lawsuit - http://eldred.cc/eldredvashcroft.html
legislation - http://eldred.cc/p2/
a book - http://www.free-culture.cc/ In a bit of walk-your-talk ReCursion, he released the book under an open license, which led to it being turned into an audio book by volunteers within a few days of it's release.
initiating development of several licenses which let creators specify open rights and conditions for using their creations. Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/

By releasing your work under one of these licenses, you help build a body of culture which is free to be re-used:

http://creativecommons.org/find/
The Free Documentation License - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
The PublicDomain? (a giving-up of your copyrights)
...

There's a bunch of others, including primarily public domain, yadda yadda...

The Free Documentation License is older, intended to ensure that documentation that comes with free software can also be free. (why create new ones?) The closest Creative Commons licenses are Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/ and Attribution Share Alike - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Links to freely (as in speech) available content:

OpenAccess? - journals, etc.
Project Gutenberg
Anyone for FreeGames?? What if you didn't have to pay a license to re-use Monopoly? or Risk? or Scrabble?
...

Also see the student groups: http://freeculture.org/