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:
“Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?... Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)