DATA REMIX

Also known as "libre culture", the free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media. The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".


Sonia Katyal, in “Performance, Property, and the Slashing of Gender in Fan Fiction”, states that "Depending upon its vantage point, the law can either empower or disable creativity, while also having a powerful impact on who actually receives access to and protection within the marketplace of cultural products. Further, as these examples might suggest, propertizing expression benefits some authors and artists, often within the mainstream, sometimes at the cost of chilling other types of artistic expression and commentary, often from “outsider” groups like women, people of color, and sexual minorities. Ignoring this result matters. If we construe a marketplace of copyrighted cultural products as a kin to, or at least reflective of, the rich diversity of the marketplace of ideas itself, then the denial of the privileges of authorship to some suggests that we are missing an important and illuminating facet of the relationships between production, representation, and consumption within copyright law."



Richard Stallman could be seen as the pioneer of this movement and of the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.




This movement has been constantly developing and continues to grow and be supported by more and more individuals. This can easily be noticed in the numerous pieces of software and projects which have been created and improved by people around the world working collaboratively.

Examples of these include pieces of software such as GIMP, Scribus, INKscape, FontForge and Blender.

At the same time artists brought a significant contribution in supporting and making this movement and rationale visible through their projects. These include Heath Bunting with his project entitled "Identity Bureau", DIWO, a joint project development model that enables like-minded people to collaboratively work on a task, project or any other service, Wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons), Aaron Koblin with his projects "The Sheep Market", "The Johnny Cash Project" etc.




Media, emphasized by and consumed through different types of technologies, affects and impacts our way of thinking, our decision making process and our actions, sometimes without realizing, not giving it high importance.
Therefore I find that the free culture movement encourages people to be more active rather than passive, encourages them to have an opinion and express it by contributing to the way media and information is mediated and consumed, and promotes creativity and innovation.