A Free Guide to Free Culture

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The EFF is an international nonprofit dedicated towards preserving free speech in the digital age. It’s probably not too far out of line to think of the EFF as sort of an international ACLU for the internet. They have all kinds of pro bono legal assistance from ridiculously smart people and are generally doing a hell of a job out there.

The Berkman Center

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is a research center at Harvard University dedicated to the legal study of cyberspace. Lawrence Lessig , hero to free culture, started Berkman with a couple of other people. The Berkman Center has close ties to Harvard Free Culture, and much of the most important free culture-related research has come out of it.

Creative Commons

You’ve probably seen the Creative Commons logo around. It’s basically a way for copyright holders to ensure they have the most control possible over their works in a time when everybody is suing everyone else for everything. Guess who was instrumental in starting creative commons?

Flickr

Flickr! Everyone knows flickr. What you might not know, though, is that lots and lots of flickr’s photographs are registered under a creative commons license, ensuring that you can use them in freer ways than, you know, if they weren’t.

Free Culture: What It Is, Why It Matters

I wrote this article about Free Culture a little under a year ago. Depressingly shameless self-promotion aside, I’ve been told it’s a good primer for the subject. If you have no idea what I’m talking about in the rest of this guide, maybe give the article a shot?

Free Culture the Book

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Internet to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity . The ridiculously long title of this book explains its contents better than I ever could, but it’s surprisingly readable and not boring at all. I swear. It coined the term “Free Culture” and, if it hadn’t happened already, made Lawrence Lessig a major figurehead for this type of copyright law.

Free Culture the Organization

The creation of Students for Free Culture marked the beginning of “Free Culture” as a concrete movement. Colleges all over the place are establishing chapters of SFC, and by all accounts they actually appear to be getting things done. Imagine!

Harvard Students for Free Culture

The blog for the Harvard chapter of Students for Free Culture. This chapter is local and has also hosted the national SFC gathering in the past. The most recent post regards burying a zune and ipod and was featured on Boing Boing .

Free Culture the Presentation

This is an audio recording of the last presentation Lawrence Lessig ever gave on free culture. The visuals are his powerpoint-esque slides. I’m not sure if Lessig has a bone in his body that is not both informative and entertaining.

Save Orphan Works

Save Orphan Works is an organization dedicated towards “moving content that is no longer commercially exploited into the public domain.” An uphill battle indeed, but if there’s one lesson worth taking from this entire rigamarole, it just might be the importance of the preservation of the public domain.

Just so you all know, the name “Eldred” is taken from a court case Lawrence Lessig participated in.

DOAJ

Open Access Journals are academic journals that permit free, permanent access for any user. Authors may contribute to them to maximize the impact or influence their research has and/or to minimize the control that traditional journals have over the distribution of their work. DOAJ stands for (and is) a Directory of Open Access Journals.