an international student movement for free culture
FreeCulture.org
is a diverse, non-partisan group of students and young people who are
working to get their peers involved in the free culture movement.
Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College, FreeCulture.org has
helped establish student groups at colleges and universities across the
United States. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters exist at over 30 colleges, from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.
Free Culture Manifesto
The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up,
participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down,
closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of
digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation
and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and
learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly
active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will
slowly but surely vanish from the earth.
We believe that culture should be a two-way
affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not be
content to sit passively at the end of a one-way media tube. With the
Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm
of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed,
based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.
We refuse to accept a future of digital
feudalism where we do not actually own the products we buy, but we are
merely granted limited uses of them as long as we pay the rent. We must
halt and reverse the recent radical expansion of intellectual property
rights, which threaten to reach the point where they trump any and all
other rights of the individual and society.
The freedom to build upon the past is necessary
for creativity and innovation to thrive. We will use and promote our
cultural heritage in the public domain. We will make, share, adapt, and
promote open content. We will listen to free music, look at free art,
watch free film, and read free books. All the while, we will
contribute, discuss, annotate, critique, improve, improvise, remix,
mutate, and add yet more ingredients into the free culture soup.
We will help everyone understand the value of
our cultural wealth, promoting free software and the open-source model.
We will resist repressive legislation which threatens our civil
liberties and stifles innovation. We will oppose hardware-level
monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their
own machines and their own data.
We won't allow the content industry to cling to
obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation. We will be
active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production,
made possible as it never was before by the Internet and digital
technology, and we will fight to prevent this new potential from being
locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the
bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a
glorified cable TV service -- if we allow the established paradigm of
creation and distribution to reassert itself -- then the window of
opportunity opened by the Internet will have been closed, and we will
have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.
The future is in our hands; we must build a
technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.
The City Repair Project is group of citizen activists creating
public gathering places and helping others to creatively transform the
places where they live.
