Free culture movement

The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content or open content by using the Internet and other forms of media.

The movement objects to over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture."

Creative Commons is an organization started by Lawrence Lessig which provides licenses that permit sharing and remixing under various conditions, and also offers an online search of various Creative Commons-licensed works.

The free culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas, is aligned with the free and open source software movement.

Today, the term stands for many other movements, including open access (OA), the remix culture, the hacker culture, the access to knowledge movement, the Open Source Learning, the copyleft movement and the public domain movement.

In the late 1960s, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. He coined the slogan Information wants to be free in 1984 against limiting access to information by governmental control, preventing a public domain of information.

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