This section is under construction and is dedicated to the emergence of a Free Culture in and beyond the Digital Commons and for the emergence and strengthening of a Free Culture Movement defending the necessary rights to achieve and maintain such a free culture.

The P2P Foundation supports the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge of the Free Culture Forum [1]

Introduction

Marco Berlinguer:

"The free culture movements comprise a wide range of experiences mainly emerging around the internet and the digital revolution. They have generally developed independently, but they are loosely aligned and show a mutually reinforcing dynamism – a ‘viral spiral’, as David Bollier terms it.

All these movements emerged as practical and cultural critiques of the aggressive attempts by corporations, aided by Northern governments, to extend intellectual property rights to knowledge, culture, information, communication and even organisms and data. The process has been described as ‘the second enclosures movement’ – the first being the enclosing of common land and turning it into private property in late and post-medieval England.

Following Felix Stalder, we can group these movements into three different clusters:

• the Free Software Movement, focusing on software source code;
• the Free Culture Movement, focusing on cultural goods; and
• the Access To Knowledge (A2K) movement, focusing on access to knowledge-intensive goods."

Read:

1. Editorial by Cory Doctorow: Free Culture as People Wanting To Be Free
2. Nina Paley: The Four Freedoms of Free Culture

Resources

Key Articles

• Report: Thomas Rogers & Andrew Szamosszegi, Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use, 2010 [2]
• The Political Tactics of the Filesharing Communities: Tactics of a challenge to the industry. by Brian Martin, Chris Moore, and Colin Salter.. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 12 - 6 December 2010 [3]

The Debate Around Filesharing

• Debating the ethics of filesharing, a composer and a teenager, summarized via http://techdirt.com/articles/20100701/10251210046.shtml

• Debating the real economic effects of filesharing

1. Is P2P file-sharing responsible for the slump in recorded music sales or does it create demand? Summary at: History of P2P Filesharing Research‎. Excerpted from the Paper: File-Sharing as Social Practice. Do-It-Yourself Access to Knowledge and its Relation to the Formal and Informal Market. By Volker Ralf Grassmuck. Research Group on Public Policy for Access to Information (GPOPAI)2 at the University of São Paulo, for The 3rd Free Culture Research Conference. Free University Berlin, 8.-9. October 2010 [4]

See also:

1. Report: Mr.Dr. Annelies Huygen, A. Huygen, P. Rutten, S. Huveneers, S. Limonard, J. Poort, J. Leenheer, K. S. Janssen, N. van Eijk, N. Helberger, Ups and downs – The Economic and Cultural Effects of File Sharing on Music, Film and Games. 3-3-2009 [5]: There is no direct causal relationship between file-sharing and the decline in revenues in the music industry. File sharing benefits the economy in long and short term.
2. Report: Felix Oberholzer-Gee y Koleman Strumpf, File Sharing and Copyright, May 15, 2009 [6] :"According to the econimists of the Harvard School of Economics , filesharing hasn’t decreased creativity neither cultural production."
3. Report: Mary Madden , The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster, 2009 [7] : On the past decade, the impact of file sharing networks produced a very fast musical content dispersion, what has led to a bigger music consumption of it’s different forms.

The Cultural Commons

1. Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment. By Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann & Katherine J. Strandburg. Cornell Law Review, Volume 95 Issue 4, May 2010 (special issue)
2. Felix Stalder: On the Differences between Open Source and Open Culture

Governance and conflict in free culture communities

1. Play Struggle, excerpts of the book Hacking Capitalism by Johan Soderbergh.
2. Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture by T.L. Taylor: Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship.
3. The Governance of Virtual Worlds. Thomas M. Malaby (focuses on Second Life as case study)
4. Inequality in Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.
5. Klang, Mathias, "Avatar: From Deity to Corporate Property - A Philosophical Inquiry into Digital Property in Online Games
6. Contrasting Proprietary and Free/Open Source Game Development, Alessandro Rossi & Marco Zamarian
7. Moore, Christopher. 2005. "Commonising The Enclosure: Online Games And Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3(2): examine the potential for computer game studies to contribute to an understanding of an alternative intellectual property regime known as the commons
8. Virtual Worlds and their Discontents: precarious sovereignty, governmentality, and the ideology of play. Essay by Julian Kucklich to be published in: games & culture (special issue on virtual worlds, edited by thomas malaby and dan hunter).
9. Authorization and Governance in Virtual Worlds. by Dan L. Burk. [8]
10. Who Owns the Mods? by Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 5 - 3 May 2010 [9]
11. The rewards of non–commercial production: Distinctions and Status in the Anime Music Video Scene. by Mizuko Ito. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 5 - 3 May 2010 [10]

The special case of the fashion industry

1. Between the Seams, A Fertile Commons: An Overview of the Relationship Between Fashion and Intellectual Property. By Christine Cox and Jennifer Jenkins: explores the relationship between fashion and various U.S. intellectual property regimes, examining why fashion design generally is not protectable under copyright, design patent, trademark or trade dress.
2. Ready to Share: Creativity in Fashion and Digital Culture. By David Bollier and Laurie Racine: argues that the fashion business reveals a great deal about the “cultural hydraulics” of creativity and the novel ways in which intellectual property law can foster, and not restrict, creative freedom.

Key Books

1. Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age. Philippe Aigrain, 2010.
2. Stalder, Felix (2006) ‘Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks’ [11]
3. Access to Knowledge: A Guide for Everyone. By Jeremy Malcolm et al. Consumers International, 2010. [12]
4. Smart Mobs. Howard Rheingold
5. The Play Ethic. By Pat Kane.
6. Hacker Ethic. Pekka Himanen.
7. Slow Living. Wency Parkins and Geoffrey Craig.
8. Understanding Knowledge as Commons. Eleanor Ostrom et al.
9. James Boyle. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. [13]
10. Common as Air. Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Lewis Hyde. 2010 = directly addresses the Cultural Commons and the history of the privatization of knowledge
11. In Praise of Copying. Marcus Boon Harvard University Press, 2010 [14]: "makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in

Key Conferences and Events

1. Free Culture between Commons and Markets: Approaching the Hybrid Economy? October 8-9, 2010 at the Free University Campus in Berlin,
2. The Oxcars in Barcelona: the annual free culture awards

Oxcars Award Videos:

1. http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/theoxcars [15]
2. http://oxcars09.exgae.net/?lang=en [16]

Key Documentaries and Videos

Documentaries:

1. 24 Hours on Craigslist, on the social aspects of Craigslist
2. 60 Minutes on the One Laptop Per Child project
3. Another Perfect World [17]: 30 minute preview of a documentary on the impact of virtual worlds
4. BBS
5. Blogumentary
6. Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age: 24 minute student documentary
7. The Code: finnish documentary about the Free Software Movement
8. Code Breakers
9. CopyCat
10. Copyright Criminals
11. Delivered in Beta: testimonials on the motivation and reasons for sharing designers, by open designers, 8 minutes, well done
12. Digital Tipping Point, A treasure trove of archival material in preparation of a full open source movie about the impact of free software and open technology on our civilization.
13. DIY Britain: on the growing Resilience movement in the UK
14. From Pamphlet to Blog
15. Good Copy, Bad Copy and Steal This Film: documentaries on copyright
16. "History of the Internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org.
17. Humanity Lobotomy, excellent open source documentary on the threat against Net Neutrality
18. Luck of Seven, open source journey through the world documenting free culture
19. Makers, on the do it yourself renaissance
20. The Next Web Documentary = five interviews on the future of the web
21. Patent Absurdity
22. Re Purpose: A look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective
23. Revolution OS = 2001 documentary on the free sofware / open source software revolution
24. The Revolution Will Be Animated: presents multiple viewpoints on copyright in the digital age
25. RiP: A remix manifesto: documentary on Remix Culture and its Copyright implications
26. Second Skin: how lives have been changed by Massive Multiplayer Online Games.
27. Steal This Film
28. Truth in Numbers, about Wikipedia
29. Us Now: a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.
30. Vlogumentary, documentary project on the history of Vlogging, i.e. video blogging [18]
31. Welcome to the Blogosphere - PBS
32. Weblog Project

Presentations:

Prado Medialab, 2009:

1. P2P Networks as a Source of Culture Manifestations in Brazil‎, The Example of Submidialogia Network, by Karla Brunet
2. Andrew Whelan on P2P's Impact on the Music Industry
3. P2P Networks, Music, and Generational Cultural Experience‎

Miscellaneous:

• Videos Illustrating the Barcelona Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

Key Distributors

1. VODO: BitTorrent-powered distribution platform with backing from uTorrent, Limewire and The Pirate Bay [19]
2. Miro: internet TV organized around channels