A discussion of differences between Free Software and Free Culture licensing, and how that has impacted Free Culture. Talk given at http://freeculture.info/

1. Culture Isn’t Always Like Software

2. Free software licenses are applied to work that is:
• Fungible
• Decomposable
• Useful
Not all cultural works have these features

3. Now there is a third category of works, which is aesthetic
works, whose main use is to be appreciated; novels, plays,
poems, drawings in many cases, typically and most
music. Typically it’s made to be appreciated. Now,
they’re not functional people don’t have the need to
modify and improve them, the way people have the need
to do that with functional works.
– Richard M. Stallman, 2000

4. the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim
O’Reilly for this great aphorism)
– Cory Doctorow, 2010

5. some of the participants in the project did attempt to
“write a novel” but it remains unclear as to whether they
succeeded
– “A Million Penguins Research Report”, 2007

6. art is a game between all people of all periods
– Marcel Duchamp

7. Free Culture Licenses Have Not Always Proceeded From A
Clear Statement Of Principle

8. For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a
suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement,
non-free software is a social problem and free software is
the solution.
– Richard M. Stallman, 1998

9. The term “open source” has been further stretched by its
application to other activities, such as government,
education, and science, where there is no such thing as
source code
– Richard M. Stallman, 2007

10. Copyright already provides leverage against media
distributors, but DRM provides leverage against
technological innovations which have given users the
capability to do much more with media than ever before.
– freeculture.org, 2013

11. Some Of The Most Popular Licenses Are Proprietary,
Not Free

12. The license must not restrict anyone from making use of
the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example,
it may not restrict the program from being used in a
business, or from being used for genetic research.
– The Debian Free Software Guidelines

13. ...most major publishers only allow “Open Access” to be
CC-NC.
– Peter Murray-Rust, 2011

14. ND Is Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient To Prevent
Misrepresentation
– Rob Myers, 2010

15. Free Culture Licenses Have Limitations

16. Despite a clearly artistic – and not commercial –
intention behind the work, Louis Vuitton is seeking
monetary penalties (220,000 Euros or roughly $307,000
and counting, with no ceiling on the penalty) and aims to
prevent Plesner from exhibiting the painting either on her
website or at venues in the European Union.
– Paul Schmelzer, 2011

17. People will ask what they have to do when they use an
FDLed image to illustrate an article [...] where the
materials complement each other, we believe that the
end result is a derivative work
– FSF, 2007

18. Don’t write your own license if you can possibly avoid it.
– Eric S. Raymond, 2002

19. what if you wanted to make a walking cat-robot that uses
a BY-SA cat design (maybe the head of the octocat) and
combines it with the robot chassis and some bears and
the [GPL] bead belt gear and a bunch of other things
– Chris Webber, 2011

20. However well-crafted a public licensing model may be, it
can never fully achieve what a change in the law would
do, which means that law reform remains a pressing
topic.
– Creative Commons, 2013

21. Sometimes it feels like something has been lost in translation
from Free Software to Free Culture