Free-culture movement

Many members of the movement argue that over-restrictive laws hinder creativity[6] and create a "permission culture", which they worry will shrink the public domain[7] and fair use.

[10] In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which President Clinton signed into law.

The bill was heavily lobbied by music and film corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge sharing and technological innovation, and that private interests – as opposed to public good – determine law.

[11] He travelled the country in 1998, giving as many as a hundred speeches a year at college campuses, and sparked the movement.

Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution's plain language about "limited" copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens.

[14][15] In 2005/2006 within the free-culture movement, Creative Commons was criticized by Erik Möller[16] and Benjamin Mako Hill for lacking minimum standards for freedom.

CC promotes sharing creative works and diffusing ideas to produce cultural vibrance, scientific progress and business innovation.

[26] The web site of the organization has a number of resources, publications, and other references related to various copyright, patent, and trademark issues.

[38] Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavors of copyright and copyleft.

The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.

[43] Other authors, such as Joshua Pearce, have argued that there is an ethical imperative for open-source hardware, specifically with respect to open-source-appropriate technology for sustainable development.

Prominent technologist and musician Jaron Lanier discusses this perspective of free culture in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget.

Lanier's concerns include the depersonalization of crowd-sourced anonymous media (such as Wikipedia) and the economic dignity of middle-class creative artists.