I wrote about the Students for Free Culture’s conference Free Culture X, taking place on Saturday and Sunday in D.C., recently for Wired.com. But for those still unclear on why open networks, copyright rethinks and more are mandatory to save the internet from monopoly, here’s further insight from Elizabeth Stark, founder of the Harvard University chapter of Students for Free Culture, student at Harvard Law School, researcher for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law Technology, and more. In other words, a hot genius.
Morphizm: Why is free culture such a hard sell, even though the economics of everything, we have come to learn, are in serious flux and doubt?
Elizabeth Stark: Of course it depends how one defines the term “free culture.” As you are hopefully aware, the “free” in “free culture” refers to the type of “free” in free speech and free expression, not the type of “free” as free in cost (or beer). I generally define free culture as the movement to promote greater access, sharing, and reworking of culture, and an environment of technological freedom that supports it. In that case, we do have a significant amount of free culture all around us, especially when it comes to the remixing, as we have seen an explosion of creativity in the last several years on that front. If free culture is about free expression through building upon the culture of the past, then we’re actually doing fairly well right now. If it’s about the limits on this kind of expression, then we still have some progress to be made within the framework of copyright and fair use law. That said, means of supporting free culture within the existing legal framework, such as Creative Commons, have seen mixed results amongst copyright holders. On one hand, Wikipedia, probably the most valuable educational resource out there right now, is under a CC license and is probably the best example to date of a successful free culture project. On the other hand, many artists and creators don’t understand copyright law and/or do not see the need for the use of CC licenses, even when they’re willing to share their work and make it available for people to remix. So in a sense we have an expansion of what I’d call “gray area” free culture that still promotes the underlying goals, but is not the more “official” type from the licensing perspective.
Morphizm.com: How has free software changed the internet’s game?
Elizabeth Stark: Free software is also an essential part of free culture, and we’ve seen a massive expansion in the adoption of FOSS, for example, via the Firefox Browser, Ubuntu, and popular FOSS applications like VLC. As people become more aware of the benefits of using FOSS and making code available for anyone to edit (for example, the SF city government recently implemented a policy to encourage the use of FOSS: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/sf-mayor-city-can-save-money-with-open-source-software.ars). Many countries elsewhere in the world are far ahead of us in the US, such as Brazil, India, and Spain.
On a related note, creators in the developing world, such as in Brazil, India, and Nigeria have functioned very well in an “open business model” environment, distributing culture successfully outside of the constraints of a copyright-laden system. Two examples of this would be the Tecno Brega music community in Brazil and the Nollywood film industry in Nigeria. In both cases, creators distribute and sell copies of music and film without restricting the flow of sharing and copying, and in some cases using the at-cost sale of music by street vendors to promote huge and highly lucrative live performances.
Ultimately, free culture will spread via the proliferation of digital technology. This is not a new concept, culture is not created in a vacuum and it never has been. We do risk a future that is more locked down, one that would not be conducive to a rich and diverse cultural environment in which people can free share and exchange ideas, but I’m confident that we will preserve a technological environment that enables this kind of free expression.
Morphizm.com: What will a free culture do to the entertainment industry as we know it? How will it help the unheard and unseen artists level the playing field?
Elizabeth Stark: The ability for people with a mere laptop to create and manipulate digital work is at the heart of the participatory environment that free culture seeks to promote. What this means is that anyone can now shoot a documentary, make a remix, or post images or text. Culture that is easily accessible and shared, especially if it is of high quality, was and is undoubtedly serving to compete with the mainstream entertainment industry in some senses (i.e. in the attention economy). But at the same time, remixes of popular film trailers or songs can serve to send people back to the original, thus potentially helping in promoting and marketing a given song or film. It’s true that the mainstream entertainment industry has not yet adopted the ethos of sharing culture (aside from Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor using CC licenses, and Radiohead making their album available “free as in beer”), but we have seen some steps to engage in a more participatory environment, such as encouraging fans to remix work, and so on. There’s an increasing recognition that culture is not a one way street, and the real way to engage people is to ask them to participate, not just to watch and listen. To me this is a good thing for free culture, although there have also been instances where remix contests have draconian rules that don’t allow any further rights on the part of the remixers.
As for unheard and unseen artists, making ones work available and sharing it is quite possibly the best way of getting yourself out there. I have seen examples of bands who have acceded to their music being on p2p sites, where it has significantly help them gain exposure. If you allow your work to be shared and remixed, then you have a greater chance of finding more people who like your work. At the same time, there is still the issue of quality, and one of the major challenges as I see it is in curation and aggregation — how do you sift out the up-and-coming, unseen, talented artists? Clearly there are blogs, communities, and sites devoted to this kind of thing, but I don’t think we’re yet where we should be in free culture curating.
Lastly, of course the issue always gets to money. How can one make a living in this day and age with the ease of copying and the difficulty of relying on the exclusivity of culture? Ultimately, free culture seeks to promote models that are not reliant on restricting access to one’s work, and it seeks to prove that this is in fact a sustainable model for culture. Wikipedia, for example, just raised $10 million in a matter of several days by asking its users to donate. Bands that make their work available are are able to attract large audiences that would never have been possible without the Internet as a distribution mechanism. Authors that make their work available under CC licenses often sell more books than they would have otherwise because of the added exposure gained. There is no one-size-fits-all model, but a free culture doesn’t mean a culture where no one can make a living. It’s a culture where we can support greater creativity without exclusivity.
FURTHER READING
Counterculture Creeps Into Mainstream at Free Culture X
[Scott Thill, Wired.com]