English users: please note that the Framakey.org and the English FramaKey package versions are still under beta stage. You may download the English Beta version of the Framakey by clicking here (92Mo to download; 200Mo installed on USB disk). If you find some typos or translation mistakes, you may edit this page (password is : english ).
Free Culture
In direct reference to the title of the book by Lawrence Lessig, “Free Culture” is an ambitious phrase for a phenomenon that is still emerging, but which gains in range and credibility day after day.
Music, photographs, texts, films… the philosophy of free software extends today way beyond the framework of application software and extends to that of digital creation in general, thanks to the contributions of artists who publish their works under an “open” license.
A license will be known as “open”, when it authorizes at least the diffusion of work. This diffusion will be, so to speak, the lowest common denominator of all the creations that we will present here.
There is a big difference between an artist who publishes a work under a license preventing any modification and/or marketing, and another one, let’s say a free software designer, who publishes unrestricted works, thus encouraging greater co-operation in distribution.
Nevertheless, it remains they all adhere to this free culture which, to the traditional “all rights reserved”, opposes the much needed “some rights reserved” and in doing so, do not see Internet as a gloomy threat, but as a formidable opportunity.
It would seem that this is only good sense. And yet, as Lawrence Lessig points out below, the current context seems to oblige us to be resistant:
“It is an ‘out-of-nowhere’ movement which aims at modifying the spirit of the public. And this movement states that culture and knowledge may be appropriated, and that consequently culture and knowledge must be protected the same way we protect any property.
For many years, this erroneous vision was harmless. With the emergence of new digital technologies, it has become essential to fight it. Because these technologies, if they allow a creative boiling, can be used to control culture and knowledge in a way that no free society has ever tolerated”
