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\title{Free Culture Advanced}
\author{Benjamin Mako Hill\\FSF Board Member}
\maketitle

Not only is the free software movement a source of software and licenses,
it is also a source of inspiration. In particular, free software has been cited
by many in the nascent free culture movement as an explicit source of
inspiration and point of departure. While the Free Software Foundation has no
position on whether works of culture should be free, many in the free software
movement have supported and helped build the new movement for free cultural
works.

However, free software and free culture, at least as articulated by the leaders
of the movements, have diverged in several important ways. Free software, as
enshrined in the FSF's \textit{Free Software Definition} (FSD) (and the
derivative and largely overlapping \textit{Debian Free Software Guidelines} and
\textit{Open Source Definition}), clearly enumerates the essential freedoms at
the heart of the free software movement: the freedoms to use, modify, share and
collaborate. The FSD provides a list of essential freedoms that serve as a
Utopian vision, a clear goal, and a demarcation line between what is free and
what is not. Many involved in free software debate when programs should or
shouldn't be free software but there's little debate about what is and isn't
free software.

Free culture, on the other hand, is defined very differently. Lawrence Lessig,
member of the FSF's board of directors and author of the book \textit{Free
  Culture}, defines the term as, ``a balance between anarchy and control''.
Elsewhere, free culture is described as the freedom for authors to choose how
their works are licensed. While essential to the possibility of licensing in
general, this type of freedom departs strongly from the type of freedom at the
core of the free software movement. Creative Commons (CC), perhaps the most
important organization in the free culture world, argues for ``some rights
reserved''---a striking contrast from the free software movement's ``essential
rights are unreservable''.

The result of the FSF's strong Utopian calls for freedom has been the vibrant
social movement that has ultimately brought about free software's success to
date. Almost-free software and shareware, popular twenty years ago before the
GNU project was well-known, have been subsumed and replaced by free software as
authors were challenged to release their work more freely so that it could be
included in Debian or Red Hat, hosted on SourceForge, or, quite simply,
referred to as free software or open source.

Seeing inspiration in the GNU GPL, but not the FSD, some in the free culture
movement have adopted the legal instruments (i.e., copyleft and licenses) of
the free software movement without the goal-setting at the heart of the free
software movement. The result has been the proliferation of licenses that solve
real problems and provide a benefit over the status quo but are controversial
within the free culture community (e.g., CC's Developing Nations or Sampling
licenses) and a situation where most creators are not challenged to release
their works more freely. The result is that today, more than three-quarters of
CC works are under the two most restrictive licenses.

Recently, in an attempt to provide such a goal, a group of free culture
advocates and Wikipedians have publicly drafted the \textit{Definition of Free
  Cultural Works}. Like the FSD, it argues for essential freedoms to use,
study, redistribute and change cultural works. However, it recognizes that
there are important differences between different types of creative goods and
it attempts to explore and speak to these differences. In particular, it
discusses the role of attribution, the idea of ``source'' data for a work, the
use of free data-formats, and technical restrictions such as Digital
Restrictions Management (DRM).

While the definition has reached a ``1.0'' stage and has been translated into
more than a dozen languages, it continues to be a work in progress and a space
for meaningful discussion about what ``freedom'' in the realm of cultural work
should mean. In an important step forward this year, the board of directors of
the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that oversees the
Wikipedia project, endorsed the idea that content in Wikimedia wikis should be
free except in several well-defined cases. They stated that the
\textit{Definition of Free Culture Works} would be their guide as to what was
and was not free enough. Other projects are underway to provide buttons that
users of qualifying CC licenses can use to explicitly reference their ethical
motivations when they reference the license of their work---much like what the
GNU GPL's preamble does for free software.

This effort does not argue that culture should be free in certain ways
\emph{because} it is in the way that free software is defined. Instead, it
takes tactical inspiration from free software for \emph{a} definition of
freedom, as well as for a strong example of an analogous social movement with a
compelling message and compelling success. It provides a way that the free
culture movement can use the licenses that groups like CC have already created
in a way that attempts to replicate free software's tactics and success.

You can find out more about the \textit{Definition of Free Cultural Works} at
\url{http://freedomdefined.org}.

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