Free Culture

   Free (as in freedom) culture is a movement aiming for the relaxation of
   [1]intellectual property restrictions, mainly that of [2]copyright, to
   allow free usage, reusing and sharing of [3]artworks and other kind of
   [4]information. Free culture argues that our society has gone too far in
   forcefully restricting the natural freedom of information by very strict
   laws (e.g. by authors holding copyright even 100 years after their death)
   and that we're hurting art, creativity, education and progress by
   continuing to strengthen restrictions on using, modifying ([5]remixing)
   and sharing things like [6]books, [7]music and scientific papers. The word
   "free" in free culture refers to freedom, not just price -- free cultural
   works have to be more than just available gratis, they must also give its
   users some specific legal rights. Nevertheless free culture itself isn't
   against commercialization of art, it just argues for rather doing so by
   other means than selling legal rights to it. The opposite of free culture
   is [8]permission culture (culture requiring permission for reuse of
   intellectual works).

   The promoters of free culture want to relax intellectual property laws
   ([9]copyright, [10]patents, [11]trademarks etc.) but also promote an ethic
   of sharing and remixing being good (as opposed to the demonizing
   anti-"[12]piracy" propaganda of today), they sometimes mark their works
   with words "some rights reserved" or even "no rights reserved", as opposed
   to the traditional "all rights reserved".

   Free culture is kind of a younger sister movement to the [13]free software
   movement, in fact it has been inspired by it (we could call it its
   [14]fork). While free software movement, established in 1983, was only
   concerned with freedoms relating to computer program source code, free
   culture later (around 2000) took its ideas and extended them to all
   information including e.g. artworks and scientific data. There are clearly
   defined criteria for a work to be considered free (as in freedom) work,
   i.e. part of the body of free cultural works. The criteria are very
   similar to those of free software (the definition is at
   https://freedomdefined.org/Definition) and can be summed up as follows:

   A free cultural work must allow anyone to (legally and practically):

    1. Use it in any way and for any purpose, even commercially.
    2. Study it.
    3. Share it, i.e. redistribute copies, even commercially.
    4. Modify it and redistribute the modified copies, even commercially.

   Some of these conditions may e.g. further require a source code of the
   work to be made available (e.g. sheet music, to allow studying and
   modification). Some conditions may however still be imposed, as long as
   they don't violate the above -- e.g. if a work allows all the above but
   requires crediting the author, it is still considered free (as in
   freedom). [15]Copyleft (also share-alike, requirement of keeping the
   license for derivative works) is another condition that may be required.
   This means that many (probably most) free culture promoters actually rely
   and even support the concept of e.g. copyright, they just want to make it
   much less strict.

   IMPORTANT NOTE: [16]fair use (or exclusive author permission) is
   unacceptable in free culture! It is an extremely common mistake, happening
   even among people long contributing to free culture, to think that within
   free culture you can use a piece of proprietary art under so called fair
   use while keeping the whole work adhering to free culture -- you cannot do
   this (even though e.g. [17]Wikipedia does this for which it actually
   seizes to be a completely free work). Fair use is a legal concept that
   allows people to use any kind of art -- even proprietary -- in some "fair"
   ways even without the permission of the copyright holder, i.e. for example
   you can likely use someone's copyrighted photograph on your website as
   long as you have a good justification for it (e.g. documenting a
   historical event with this being the only existing photo of it), if you
   only include a low resolution version and if you're not making money off
   of it -- this could be judged fair use by the court, i.e. you wouldn't be
   violating copyright. However a work that is to be free licensed must allow
   ANY use, not just fair use, i.e. it mustn't contain any part under fair
   use, or even under EXCLUSIVE author's permission for it to be used within
   that project, because such part would only limit the work to be used in
   the "fair use" way ONLY. While in some contexts, e.g. in hobbyist
   projects, such work will likely be legal, i.e. fair use, in other context,
   like commercial ones (which free culture MUST enable), this fair use part
   will suddenly seize to be fair use and the use will be illegal. Similarly
   if you e.g. want to use someone's music in your free culture movie, it is
   NOT enough to get the author's permission to use the music in your movie,
   the author has to give permission to EVERYONE to use it in ANY WAY,
   because if your movie is to be under a free license, anyone will be able
   to take any part out of your movie and use it in any other way. { I
   actually managed to get some characters out of the [18]SuperTuxKart game
   for this reason, there were some mascots that were used under exclusive
   permission, which was unacceptable and Debian maintainers sorted this out.
   So just for the confirmation of this fact: Debian also confirmed this.
   ~drummyfish }

   It was in 2001 when [19]Lawrence Lessig, an American lawyer who can be
   seen as the movement's founder, created the [20]Creative Commons, a
   non-profit organization which stands among the foundations of the movement
   and is very much connected to it. By this time he was already educating
   people about the twisted intellectual property laws and had a few
   followers. Creative Commons would create and publish a set of [21]licenses
   that anyone could use to release their works under much less restrictive
   conditions than those that lawfully arise by default. For example if
   someone creates a song and releases it under the [22]CC-BY license, he
   allows anyone to freely use, modify and share the song as long as proper
   attribution is given to him. It has to be noted that NOT all Creative
   Commons licenses are free culture (those with NC and ND conditions break
   the above given rules)! It is also possible to use other, non Creative
   Commons licenses in free culture, as long as the above given criteria are
   respected.

   In 2004 Lessig published his book called Free Culture that summarized the
   topic as well as proposed solutions -- the book itself is shared under a
   Creative Commons license and can be downloaded for free (however the
   license is among the non-free CC licenses so the book itself is not part
   of free culture [23]lmao, big fail by Lessig).

   { I'd recommend reading the Free Culture book to anyone whose interests
   lie close to free culture/software, it's definitely one of the essential
   works. ~drummyfish }

   In the book Lessig gives an overview of the history of copyright -- it has
   been around since about the time of invention of [24]printing press to
   give some publishers exclusive rights (an artificial [25]monopoly) for
   printing and publishing certain books. The laws evolved but at first were
   not so restrictive, they only applied to very specific uses (printing) and
   for limited time, plus the copyright had to be registered. Over time
   corporations pressured to make it more and more restrictive -- nowadays
   copyright applies to basically everything and lasts for 70 years AFTER the
   death of the author (!!!). This is combined with the fact that in the age
   of computers any use of information requires making a copy (to read
   something you need to download it), i.e. copyright basically applies to
   ANY use now. I.e. both scope and term of copyright have been extended to
   the extreme, and this was done even AGAINST the US constitution -- Lessig
   himself tried to fight against it in court but lost. This form of
   copyright now restricts culture and basically only serves corporations who
   want to e.g. kill the [26]public domain (works that run out of copyright
   and are now "free for everyone") by repeatedly prolonging the copyright
   term so that people don't have any pool of free works that would compete
   (and often win simply by being gratis) with the corporate created
   "content". In the books Lessig also mentions many hard punishments for
   breaking copyright laws and a lot of other examples of corruption of the
   system. He then goes on to propose solutions, mainly his Creative Commons
   licenses.

   Free culture has become a relative success, the free Creative Commons
   licenses are now widely used -- [27]Wikipedia is one of the most famous
   examples of free culture as it is licensed under the [28]CC-BY-SA and its
   sister project [29]Wikimedia Commons hosts over 80 million free cultural
   works! [30]Openstreetmap is a free cultural collaborative project offering
   maps of the whole world, [31]libregamewiki and [32]opengameart are sites
   focused on creation of free cultural video games and game assets and there
   are many more. There are famous promoters of free culture such as [33]Nina
   Paley, there exist webcomics, books, songs etc. In development of libre
   [34]games free cultural licenses are used (alongside free software
   licenses) to liberate the game assets -- e.g. the [35]Freedoom project
   creates free culture content replacement for the game [36]Doom. Many
   scientists release their data to public domain under [37]CC0. And of
   course, [38]LRS highly advocated free culture, specifically [39]public
   domain under [40]CC0.

   BEWARE of fake free culture: there are many resources that look like or
   even call themselves "free culture" despite not adhering to its rules.
   This may be by intention or not, some people just don't know too much
   about the topic -- a common mistake is to think that all Creative Commons
   licenses are free culture -- again, this is NOT the case (the NC and ND
   ones are not). Some think that "free" just means "gratis" -- this is not
   the case (free means freedom, i.e. respecting the above mentioned criteria
   of free cultural works). Many people don't know the rules of copyright and
   think that they can e.g. create a remix of some non-free pop song and
   license it under CC-BY-SA -- they CANNOT, they are making a derivative
   work of a non-free work and so cannot license it. Some people use licenses
   without knowing what they mean, e.g. many use CC0 and then ask for their
   work to not be used commercially -- this can't be done, CC0 specifically
   allows any commercial use. Some try to make their own "licenses" by e.g.
   stating "do whatever you want with my work" instead of using a proper
   waiver like CC0 -- this is with high probability legally unsafe and
   invalid, it is unfortunately not so easy to waive one's copyright -- DO
   use the existing licenses. Educate yourself and if you're unsure, ask away
   in the community, people are glad to give advice.

See Also

     * [41]free software
     * [42]free universe
     * [43]freedom distance
     * [44]copyfree
     * [45]kopimi
     * [46]samizdat

Links:
1. intellectual_property.md
2. copyright.md
3. art.md
4. information.md
5. remix.md
6. book.md
7. music.md
8. permission_culture.md
9. copyright.md
10. patent.md
11. tm.md
12. piracy.md
13. free_software.md
14. fork.md
15. copyleft.md
16. fair_use.md
17. wikipedia.md
18. supertuxkart.md
19. lessig.md
20. creative_commons.md
21. license.md
22. cc_by.md
23. lmao.md
24. printing_press.md
25. monopoly.md
26. public_domain.md
27. wikipedia.md
28. cc_by_sa.md
29. wm_commons.md
30. osm.md
31. lgw.md
32. oga.md
33. nina_paley.md
34. game.md
35. freedoom.md
36. doom.md
37. cc0.md
38. lrs.md
39. public_domain.md
40. cc0.md
41. free_software.md
42. free_universe.md
43. freedom_distance.md
44. copyfree.md
45. kopimi.md
46. samizdat.md