Culture Isn’t Always Like Software

Free software licenses are applied to work that is:

• Fungible

• Decomposable

• Useful

Not all cultural works have these features

Now there is a third category of works, which is aestheticworks, whose main use is to be appreciated; novels, plays,poems, drawings in many cases, typically and mostmusic. Typically it’s made to be appreciated. Now,they’re not functional people don’t have the need tomodify and improve them, the way people have the needto do that with functional works.

– Richard M. Stallman, 2000

the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to TimO’Reilly for this great aphorism)

– Cory Doctorow, 2010

some of the participants in the project did attempt to“write a novel” but it remains unclear as to whether theysucceeded

– “A Million Penguins Research Report”, 2007

art is a game between all people of all periods– Marcel Duchamp

Free Culture Licenses Have Not Always Proceeded From AClear Statement Of Principle

For the Open Source movement, non-free software is asuboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement,non-free software is a social problem and free software isthe solution.

– Richard M. Stallman, 1998

The term “open source” has been further stretched by itsapplication to other activities, such as government,education, and science, where there is no such thing assource code

– Richard M. Stallman, 2007

Copyright already provides leverage against mediadistributors, but DRM provides leverage againsttechnological innovations which have given users thecapability to do much more with media than ever before.

– freeculture.org, 2013

Some Of The Most Popular Licenses Are Proprietary,Not Free

The license must not restrict anyone from making use ofthe program in a specific field of endeavor. For example,it may not restrict the program from being used in abusiness, or from being used for genetic research.

– The Debian Free Software Guidelines

...most major publishers only allow “Open Access” to beCC-NC.

– Peter Murray-Rust, 2011

ND Is Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient To PreventMisrepresentation

– Rob Myers, 2010

Free Culture Licenses Have Limitations

Despite a clearly artistic – and not commercial –intention behind the work, Louis Vuitton is seekingmonetary penalties (220,000 Euros or roughly $307,000and counting, with no ceiling on the penalty) and aims toprevent Plesner from exhibiting the painting either on herwebsite or at venues in the European Union.

– Paul Schmelzer, 2011

People will ask what they have to do when they use anFDLed image to illustrate an article [...] where thematerials complement each other, we believe that theend result is a derivative work

– FSF, 2007

Don’t write your own license if you can possibly avoid it.– Eric S. Raymond, 2002

what if you wanted to make a walking cat-robot that usesa BY-SA cat design (maybe the head of the octocat) andcombines it with the robot chassis and some bears andthe [GPL] bead belt gear and a bunch of other things

– Chris Webber, 2011

However well-crafted a public licensing model may be, itcan never fully achieve what a change in the law woulddo, which means that law reform remains a pressingtopic.

– Creative Commons, 2013

Sometimes it feels like something has been lost in translationfrom Free Software to Free Culture