What is the free culture movement?
The free culture movement aims to free society from the gatekeepers that dictate how we may express ourselves, share ideas, and communicate with one another. In other words, it's a global social movement that advocates freedom of thought and speech and expression in a time where naturally, modern technology would foster these freedoms, but is instead often used to hamper them. In the context of modern technology, the law has begun making more and more exceptions to these freedoms, and increasingly this decline in legal protection for basic freedoms is extending to general context as well.
How does it affect me?
You're probably familiar with some of the inconveniences that may come with the degradation of these freedoms. Sometimes you can't copy your music, videos, or other files, and your entire collection may disappear if you try to use another media player. Sometimes companies make devices that only run the programs they say you can run. Sometimes you have a tough time keeping information private online, and you begin to change the way you behave. All around, the law is changing to suit these practices, but the implications of this are far greater than these inconveniences. Whether a device prevents you from taking the advertisement off of a webpage, from sharing a song with a friend, or from speaking your mind to the world, the principles are the same.
Why does it matter?
The free culture movement is a broad movement, one that extends over the right to remix a song, to the elimination of such technologies that enable mass digital book burnings, from increasing media literacy, to ending monopolies on medicines that people around the world are dying without. This is a movement that recognizes that life is not read-only. Life should be read-and-write. Everyone should be able to participate in our shared culture, and nobody should be left merely a consumer. In three words: ideas are free.
How are we losing freedom?
We are losing the freedoms of thought and expression to several forces under the guise of preventing piracy, protecting the children, and even stopping terrorists. There are governments that fear the loss of control that comes with the freedom to escape the framing that power puts around things and tell stories any way we want. There are those with conflicting financial interests: the data miners that need to know what you want before you want it so they can sell you to somebody; the network operators that need all your data to go through them; the media conglomerates, intellectual property giants, and so called content "owners" that need monopoly rights over the distribution of information or the use of ideas; and the web services that need you store your personal data on their computers so that all of your friends will also be forced to join.
They may be working against our freedom by encouraging the production of technologies with antifeatures built to limit these freedoms, by using their position in the market to block technologies that threaten their dated business models, by criminalizing those who excercise these essential freedoms, and by simply existing-- the very nature of these forces are antithetical to the free culture movement.
How do we garauntee freedom?
Culture is free when our laws, our technology, and ourselves all recognize and respect that ideas are free. We are working to protect these freedoms on both a technological and a legal front. We advocate the expansion of free cultural works, which legally guarantee essential freedoms to everyone, to disable media giants from buying up our culture and serving it in a read-only format. We fight for free software, which does the same, but also ensures that users are always in control of their own technology. We support peer-to-peer technologies that enable the sharing of knowledge in an ideally efficient mode of distribution across widely diverse networks. We defend privacy and anonymity as critical for free speech and essential to being human.