Free-culture movement

The free-culture movement advocates people’s freedom to create, share, remix, and reuse cultural works, often through copyright reform and open licensing.

Copyright: A legal framework that grants creators exclusive rights over specified uses of their works. The movement challenges how copyright restricts sharing and adaptation.
Free Software Foundation: A nonprofit organization founded to promote computer users’ freedom to run, study, modify, and share software. Its software-freedom framework helped shape free-culture arguments.
Richard Stallman: A programmer and activist who founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. His work on software freedom supplied a major precedent for cultural freedom.
Open educational resources: Teaching and learning materials released under terms that permit free access and, often, adaptation and redistribution. They show how open licensing can widen access to educational materials.
Proprietary software: Software whose owners restrict access to its source code or users’ rights to modify and redistribute it. Its control model contrasts with the movement’s emphasis on permission to reuse.
Creative Commons: A nonprofit organization and suite of licenses that let creators grant public permissions for their works. Its licenses offer practical alternatives to all-rights-reserved copyright.
GNU General Public License: A copyleft software license that grants use, modification, and distribution rights while preserving those freedoms in derivatives. It demonstrates how licensing can require freedom to persist through adaptations.
Lawrence Lessig: A legal scholar who co-founded Creative Commons and wrote extensively about copyright and internet culture. He popularized the movement’s case for reforming copyright in the digital age.
Wikimedia Commons: An online repository of freely licensed and public-domain media files used by Wikimedia projects and others. It makes reusable cultural works available at large scale.
All rights reserved: A copyright notice indicating that the rights holder reserves the exclusive rights granted by copyright law. It marks the restrictive default that open licensing seeks to alter.

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Open knowledgeRelated: It connects open knowledge to broader arguments about creativity and cultural participation.