The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media.
The movement objects to overly-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".
Creative Commons is a well-known website which was started by Lawrence Lessig. It lists licenses that permit sharing under various conditions, and also offers an online search of various creative-commons-licensed productions.
The free culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas, is of a whole with the free software movement. Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project, and free software activist, advocates free sharing of information. He famously stated that free software means free as in “free speech,” not “free beer.”
Today, the term stands for many other movements, including hacker computing, the access to knowledge movement and the copyleft movement.
The term “free culture” was originally the title of a 2004 book by Lawrence Lessig, a founding father of the free culture movement.
Read more about Free Culture Movement: Background, Organizations, Defining Freedom, Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the words free, culture and/or movement:
“Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)