[FC-discuss] Free Software and Free Culture

[Rob Myers]

Fred Benenson wrote:
> Right, but the problem is -- the act of using "culture" is different 
> from the act of using software. Where some rights for enjoying software 
> freely might be necessary (to inspect code, share, etc.), it's not clear 
> that those freedoms are necessary for me to enjoy a movie, for example.  
> Is it crucial for me to have access to the source footage of a 
> documentary in order for me to fully enjoy it freely? While I think all 
> software should be free, it's not clear that all culture should be so. 
> Stallman believes this as well -- that certain kinds of cultural works 
> don't have to be "free as in speech." So while it may make sense to use 
> free software exclusively, I don't think it makes sense or is possible 
> to use (consume? download?) free culture exclusively.

Free Software as described by Stallman comes from the fact that software 
is functional, it is basically a machine. A novel, a play, a painting or 
a concerto are not functional, they are not machines. So we cannot use 
the same arguments that Stallman advances for software, and the freedoms 
are not necessarily the same. For cultural artefacts represented as 
software, Stallman's freedoms do apply but this is because the work is 
software. The claims of some artists that blahblahblah do not change this.

For cultural work in general you do actually need very similar freedoms 
to those that you need for software. This is partly an accident (source 
code is regarded as literary work for the purposes of copyright) and 
partly because public culture in an open society must not close off 
comment, critique, study or succession. This requires that you be free 
to analyse, copy and modify the work.

The minimal freedom that you need for cultural works is Extended Fair 
Use (XFU) as described by Negativland. I think that Stallman and Lessig 
agree on this despite Stallman's writing about functional, opinion and 
expressive works (Stallman's simple "you can copy this essay unmodified" 
license should make its support for Fair Use explicit). Copyleft is a 
superset of XFU, it gives you all the freedom of XFU and more, but it 
frightens the horses economically speaking.

I agree that it does not make sense to try to live on Free Culture 
alone. Reform is needed in the mainstream, we cannot reproduce the last 
70 years of culture in the way that the GNU project has recreated a 
functional equivalent of UNIX. There is no functional equivalency in 
culture, and there is no way we can catch up on seventy years worth of 
work in every medium rather than fifteen years worth of work in a single 
medium (as UNIX was in 1984). It is very important to lobby for legal 
reform in the name of Free Culture.

But this does not make alternative licenses useless by any means. We can 
use Free Software's tactic of producing a free alternative in order to 
place pressure on a proprietary project could be effective. The 
existence of a pool of self-identified freedom can show the need for 
broader freedom when lobbying. And it may be ethical to produce one's 
own work with the freedom that one would wish to enjoy generally.

- Rob.