Free Culture

From Sharewiki.org
Defining 'Free culture needs first a definition of Culture


Free Culture as mostly known today, is yet a new trend heavier promoted since the rising of the digital revoltuion's age which kind of started with the logic of applying the software 4 freedom's rules proposed from the gnu.org for a free software license into other cultural digital works.

You better go to see the Free digital cultural works' page.

Why

For long time, the FSF's proposition for cultural works was: We don't taka a stand on whether other cultural works than software and software manuals have to be free, in case you want, you could:

  1. Use the GPL, just noting what you mean by 'Your Program's Sources'. (too bloated for the cultural works' end user)
  2. Use of Art libre license. Similar in spirit to the GPL one, but much crappier in terms of robustness.
  3. Use the GNU (non)Free Documentation License for some practical cultural works.

They didn't promoted much and never wanted to treat the specific cultural issue of software different than primarily. There wasn't the need for semi-restrictive software's licenses, nor a definition of free (other) cultural works.

The GNU FDL

The origin of the free software movement as mostly know today, began with the GNU manifesto. Its author later wanted to add that manifesto in the his Free software program manual's distribution but was so afraid of spoofing that he thoguht basic to don't allow modifications on a part of the manual(The gnu manifesto) so forced the creation of Invariant Sections within a free manual because probably he was unsure whether the copyrigth's moral rights applied or not.(i. e. they don't apply to software in some countries).

His stand was that for software it's critic to be able to modify it for granting its functioning, but for movies there's not need of being able to modify it for using it freely.

The wikipedia it's been using the GNU FDL since its origin up to 2009 when they changed into the CC BY-SA.


Creative commons example

Creative Commons has been a big propeller of the free culture movement. They offer one license which can be considered almost similar to the GPL for free software(CC-BY-SA) and another one which can be considered similar to the spirit of the BSD license for software (CC-BY).

Criticism

They are also offering other licenses which are more restrictive, especially the CC-BY-NC-ND.

Irrelevant Conclusion fallacy that owner is free:

freedom is about being able to choose all but not completely restrictiveness

Free culture can produce non-free cultural works. So Free culture = Unfree culture = Free unculture .

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