Free Culture Intro

The student newspaper at my university has a “Features” section, where articles of about 500 words covering a wide range of topics are printed. I’m hoping to get some free culture goodness going on campus and figured an article there would be a good place to start. The editors were kind enough to accommodate me, even letting me license it with CC-BY-SA, and it’s being printed tomorrow. The article is below, and I hope it’s both factually accurate and faithful to the sentiments of the movement - it’s really tough to explain such a large topic in such a small space!!

Before the 20^th Century, culture was largely participatory; as a result of the emergence of the recording industries, and mediums such as radio and television, culture increasingly became a one-way affair, too expensive for the ordinary person to produce. The arrival of digital technologies, particularly the computer and the internet, have made it possible to shift the modes of production and distribution back to the hands of ordinary people, giving participatory culture another chance to flourish.

This is a largely digital revolution, but a revolution none the less. Take the way we look up information: no longer do we turn to a traditional encyclopaedia such as Britannica, but to Wikipedia, which says this about itself:

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopaedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Web site.

While you’d still be wise to cross-reference any information from Wikipedia, as you would with any source, one of the amazing things about this community created work is that studies have found it to be approximately as accurate as Britannica. One thing you might not be aware of while using Wikipedia, however, is the license that it releases all of its content under.

The GNU Free Documentation License is a clever piece of work: rather than using copyright law to prohibit you from using works released under it, it uses copyright law to guarantee that you will always be free to use, modify, redistribute and study works released under it. These are the freedoms at the heart of the free culture movement; these are the freedoms that safe-guard our ability to cooperate in the digital age.

This movement for a free culture, where people collaborate to create great works such as Wikipedia, is much wider than Wikipedia alone. You can see it embodied in the One Laptop Per Child initiative; in the Public Library of Science; in great archives of music such as Jamendo, and innovative record labels like Magnatune; and in projects such as the Internet Archive.

While this is an awfully superficial overview of the movement, it hopefully goes some way to express the flavour of everything that falls under the banner of free culture, and perhaps of why you might want to participate.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.