Free Culture

In early 2004 a law professor from Princeton named Lawrence Lessig published a book called Free Culture about the implications of copyright law and intellectual property on culture and the arts (Lessig, 2004). In accord with the principles contained in his writings, Lessig did more than simply make a copy of his work available for purchase in book form. He provided a free version of the book on his website in multiple formats and used a new form of copyright protection called Creative Commons to allow other artists and writers to use his work as they chose. Exposure to and interest in Lessig’s work was dramatic. A student group at the Swarthmore University created a website and organization, called Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, based on his ideas. Dozens of representations, of the book, including audio, website and multimedia formats were created by fans who took advantage of the unique copyright system which encouraged derivative works by others. Basically, the meme Lessig unleashed into the wilds of the Internet began to circulate in dramatic ways, a benefit that was likely as much as result of the chosen method of publication as the popularity of its ideas.

Lessig’s book “is not much about the Internet itself. It is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and […] much more important. That tradition is the way our culture gets made” (Lessig, 2004). Free Culture traces the roots of copyright law throughout the 20th century and shows how previously successful applications of copyright theory and practice are being systematically changed to favor major media conglomerates and content owners over the rights of a new generation of artists and creators. The purpose of this account is not to paraphrase Professor Lessig, but to demonstrate one of the most important ways that the thinking of FOSS programmers has left the confines of software creation and began to effect culture and creativity as a whole. The Creative Commons licensing system which Lessig used is the work of a non-profit organization who’s lawyers created a variety of copyright deeds which are freely available to artists, writers, musicians and other creators to use for their work. This inversion of the copyright system, based on RMS’ GPL license, has resulted in a rapidly growing collection of creative content that is meant to be shared, a kind of immediate public domain in the arts. As websites5 emerge to catalog this new “common content” and a vocabulary and literature concerning it evolves, one begins to see a global creative community who’s blatant intent is to offer an alternative to a commodity-based market in information.

As Christopher Kelty writes of these “commoners,” in a recent edition of Anthropology Quarterly, “they nonetheless share something with the Native Americans, Peruvian farmers, or diasporic peoples so commonly studied in anthropology: they seem vitally concerned with developing new strategies for maintaining a threatened ‘way of life,’ which they see both as legitimate and as in need of innovative means of defense—it is their ‘culture’” (Kelty, 2004).