Free Culture movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Free Culture movement is a social movement that promotes the free distribution of creative works on the Internet as well as other mediums, and objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, which members of the movement argue, hinder creativity. Closely associated with the free culture movement are organizations in the free software movement, such as the Free Software Foundation.

Another organization commonly associated with Free Culture is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University and a prominent figure in the free software movement. He wrote a book called Free Culture, which provides many arguments in favor of the free culture movement.

The student organization FreeCulture.org is sometimes confusingly called "the Free Culture Movement," but that is not its official name. The organization is a subset of the greater movement.

[edit] Wikimedia

Wikimedia's projects arguably constitute the largest single free culture project; more content is licensed under CC licenses, but that represents the output of a diverse group of artists and is not unified like the Wikimedia projects are. Wikimedia was founded by Jimmy Wales. Based on ideas of the Free Culture Movement, Jimmy Wales also has announced ten challenges for the movement in general with A Free Culture Manifesto at the Wikimania 2005.

Those 10 things that should be free within the next decade are: