Free Culture

Prá quem não entendeu direito (e tá com preguiça de ir direto na fonte), um resumo bem didático e direto:


The mission of Free Culture is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture rather than the current top-down, closed, proprietary structure. We believe that culture is a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not sit at the end of a one-way media tube and buy things until we look like the people on Friends. Thanks to the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit. We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism where we do not actually own the products we buy, but we are merely granted limited uses of them as long as we pay the rent. We must halt and reverse the recent radical expansion of "intellectual property rights," which threaten to reach the point where they trump any and all other rights of the individual and society. The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We will use and promote our cultural heritage in the public domain. We will make, share, adapt, and promote Open Content. We will listen to Free Music, look at Free Art, watch Free Film, and read Free Books. All the while, we will discuss, annotate, improve, improvise, remix, mutate, and throw yet more ingredients into the Free Culture soup. We will fight to make everyone understand the value of our common wealth, evangelizing for GNU/Linux and the free software model. We will resist repressive legislation which threatens our civil liberties and stifles innovation, such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the proposed Induce Act. We will organize to prevent Microsoft and others from pushing through hardware-level monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their own machines and their own data. The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.