This document provides an overview of the Free Culture movement, which advocates transforming cultural production through regulatory frameworks based on peer-to-peer networks, open source, and free software. It mobilizes creative professionals and holds events like the annual Free Culture Forum in Barcelona. The movement defends internet neutrality and openness. It views creativity as a collaborative process of remixing and sharing, rather than being defined by commercial products. While not against markets, it argues that corporate control restricts creativity and that governments should ensure network neutrality and access. The research will take an ethnographic approach to explore the values and practices of digital cultural production within Free Culture through participant observation rather than evaluate its ideology or viability.

1. From the clashing of models to the
sharing of values: an approach to
digital cultural production from
Free Culture creative practices

2. An ethnographic approach to the
'Free Culture' movement in the
context of an interdisciplinary
study on creative practices,
participation and digital media.

3. Free Culture (Lessig, 2005) is a
global Internet based
movement embedded with
various initiatives that
advocates a transformation of
cultural production through
the development of regulatory
frameworks for cultural
products creation, circulation
and consumption based on
p2p networks models, open
source and free software
movement (Stallman, 2002).

4. Free Culture mobilizes
people in the “creative
class” (Florida, 2002) and
generates different local
events, as the annual Free
Culture Forum or the
Creative Commons Film
Festival in Barcelona.
Strong based internet
movement that defend the
neutrality of the net and its
basic structure: end-toend and openness as key
principles for technological
and cultural innovation.
Arros Movie
Creative
Free Culture
Commons Film
Forum,
Festival,
Barcelona, 2011
Barcelona,
2012
Free Culture
Forum,
Barcelona,
2011
[No-Res]

5. The core of Digital Culture is creativity .
Creativity is not defined by a product
(“symbolic goods”) but as a process that
entails collaboration, remixing and
sharing.
Corporate enclosure restrict the
emergence of creative ideas.
Governments have a role to play in
ensuring internet neutrality and fair
acces to anyone .
Citizens must be aware that the
neutrality of the net is something that
has to be continously worked.

6. It is not a movement “against” the market.
It does not propose not to pay for cultural
products.
It is concieved as a “Forum” for reflection upon
and debate about the cultural work in the era
of digital reproduction.
- How the “field” of Cultural Production is
and can be transformed by the digital.
- Which is the role of “Cultural Production”
in relation to culture at large.
It is not (only) a question of “ideology” and
“belief” , but it is about practices of
creation, practices of regulation and practices
of consumption: about ways of doing things.

7. Culture is not a “movie”
but producing a movie is
making culture
ARROS MOVIE
DIGITAL CULTURE = POPULAR CULTURE
Culture is not a commodity
but for making movies you
need money
Culture is community
building :
A movie is not only a creative
process, is a participatory
process, a cultural event.
As in popular culture, cultural
events are done by people
for the people. The process is
the goal, not the product.

8. A Creative Commons
militant film:
“We believe in
approaching film from
a new kind of
production paradigm:
one based on media
democratization.
Another way of
producing is possible.”
Redefinition of the
relationship
producers-publics:
transparent, personal,
present, based on real
commitment.
ACTIVIST FILMMAKING
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

9. There are many ways of
understanding
creation, participatory
practices and the market in
Digital Culture. The
ethnographic question of this
reserach is to explore them
Not in order to see how or
if two models –market or
procomun- are clashing,
merging or co-existing.
What matters... and which
are the values “they” and
“we” share...
Not in order to see if FC or
CC is “in reality” an
alternative and sustainible
mode of production.
Not in order to see if they
are wright or wrong.
But to grasp what is at
stake in their practices,
debates and narratives

10. The promises and discomforts in digital culture are expressed
in terms of opposition between social and market models
(Benkler, 2006), between profit and common good motivations
(Banks and Potts, 2010) or as contradictory digital and predigital logics (Lessig, 2005).
Creativity enters the contemporary discussions of making and
doing things (Ingold, 2007) and is seen as the new organizing
principle for its transformative capacity to locate opportunity
in “unusal” spaces: knowledge, ideas, relationships, global and
local communities (Hartley, 2005).

11. Digital Culture makes it imperative that
the concepts of participation, culture and
creativity be reassessed and repositioned
at the center of public policy, bussiness
models and social movements.
But the cultural forms that these concepts
take and produce are not fixed in the
technology nor it is a question of historical
impulse or social drive, but what our daily
doings perform.
Political action is embedded in daily
practices of doing things and doing
things in specific ways.

12. what is creativity?
which values are at stake?