Advancing a Definition of Free Culture

Location: Location The Moscone Center Howard Street, between 3rd and 4th Streets, San Francisco, CA http://www.moscone.com/attendees/directions/index.shtml. This talk will introduce and describe the movement for free culture, access to knowledge, and open knowledge movements. These groups are frequently compared to the free and open source movements; both free software and free culture share a similar critique of intellectual property, a similar goal of access to information and a similar set of legal instruments (i.e., licenses) through which they attempt to achieve these goals. However, through its stronger emphasis on licenses and creator-centric messages, free culture and free software diverge in important ways as well. While the free knowledge movement, and Creative Commons in particular, calls for "some rights reserved," the FSD defined free software as software that respects the four essential and unreservable freedoms to use, modify, share, and collaborate without restrictions. This talk will describe the speaker's work on the Definition of Free Cultural Works aimed to provide both a definition and a goal: a Utopian vision of a world where culture is truly free and a set of standards by which we can judge our movement's success -- a vision of "essential rights are unreservable."