This text is part of the source material for the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge and was a the product of an intense day of discussions during the Politics Working Group at the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, Spain (Oct 28-Nov 1, 2009). The text was composed by myself, Tina Ryoon Andersen and Stina Marie Hasse Jorgensen. Other working group members are listed at the bottom.
The Politics of Principled Production in Free Culture
First and foremost, the group agrees that free culture means much more than free licenses. In as much as what we are doing can be construed as a social movement, it is essential that both the content that we produced and the means by which it is distributed enable us to convey a new constellation of ideas to a new and broader set of audiences, who in turn act as both recipients and remixers of our content.
The near instantaneousness of global distribution afforded us by new technologies offers both new opportunities to communicate ideas and consequently new ways of thinking and sharing ideas across space that were not possible through the communications technologies available in previous decades.
As cultural practitioners, we strongly believe in the importance of non-exclusive distribution methods via community-owned or community-controlled infrastructures. When we engage with corporate-owned media distribution networks, we insist that these networks offer us a guarantee of data portability and transparency. In the selection of distribution media for our work, we favor open formats and open protocols that allow our work to reach broad audiences across platforms and operating systems.
As a cultural and social movement, we strive to produce cultural works that go beyond the works produced in previous generations of media and cultural production through top-down models. While some of our works may fall into the same genres as mainstream cultural works (comedy, fiction, journalism, documentary, etc.), we also valorize the work of marginalized communities of cultural producers and new genres. Much of our work is distinct in the techniques, methods and means of production. Remixing each other's work and collaborating across cultural and national boundaries enables us to develop these new ways of communicating. These new methods of both production and distribution have enabled us to produce new and different works.
With the rise of mainstream employment of "Web 2.0" technologies by many large corporations, we see a growing tendency for profit-seeking entities to embrace the use of nominally free forms of production and distribution of cultural content. As Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies continue to develop, a growing contingent of corporate actors are beginning to abandon this specific method of control of cultural works. We foresee a growing movement on the part of companies to embrace a broadly construed model of "free" cultural production and distribution as a market strategy, following on the tails of highly successful for-profit development of free and open source technologies.
We see these business strategies not as employing a new set of enlightened approaches to technological challenges, but rather as a necessary move to compete with the widely adopted peer-to-peer file-sharing networks which, by both legal and illegal means distribute media quickly, efficiently and at virtually zero cost to end users. Our group identifies the business model of nominally free cultural production and distribution on the part of mainstream, large corporations as a way to maximize profits, as opposed to that of the free culture movement, which explicitly seeks to maximize freedom of communication of ideas in the interest of positive social change.
Within our community, there is a divide with regard to the legitimacy of profit-seeking in the production and distribution of cultural work on a variety of scales. While some members of the free culture movement see markets and the profit motive as integral and essential to the production of culture, others prefer a more radical shift away from these models which currently dominate global cultural systems.
Many free culture activists are employing a multitude of both new and old strategies for producing works and stimulating cultural production. In previous generations, many of our societies' most important artists produced their seminal work while receiving some form of state support, ranging from welfare or social security benefits which afforded them a meager but sufficient means of survival while developing their work, to formal institutional support through state-funded universities, museums, and other cultural institutions. These forms of state support—complemented in many cases by private foundations and cultural institutions which insulate cultural producers from market forces—are absolutely essential for the development of both individual cultural creators and their communities.
In order for individual creators to be successful, they must be afforded by society a level of financial security that gives them the time to develop a deep knowledge of previous work and to experiment—and fail—in their own work with the knowledge that they will be able to fulfill their own basic material necessities.
State support for cultural creators—while critical for cultural production—also presents a potential problem in cases where it compromises the autonomy of producers to determine the content of their work. Censorship is not the only concern in this area; systematic support for certain types of cultural work at the expense of others also constitutes a significant concern for our movement. Allocation of state support for the arts must be transparent, sustained, and meritocratic to the fullest extent possible. Free digital distribution of state-supported work is a key priority for our movement, which in turn calls for novel ways of states to rethink the granting of rewards for popular and successful works.
Community-driven models of supporting cultural production are an increasingly viable option for members of our community seeking to develop new works. Online platforms such as Kickstarter.com, Firstgiving.com, Fundable.com, Chipin.com and numerous others offer creators fast and relatively easy ways to raise a limited amount of funds for projects. These platforms support both donation-based models as well as offering the ability to return physical or digital finished products to the community of funders. Unfortunately, these forms of fundraising are not sustainable ways of supporting cultural creators in many cases.
Collectives, cooperatives and fair-trade cultural goods offer additional alternative models of supporting the production of free and autonomous cultural work. By creating new communities or finding new ways of connecting producers and their audiences, these alternative arrangements produce important and distinct results as compared to the other means described above.
Music, film, books and other cultural forms each require different methods of both production and distribution. While musicians are increasingly succeeding in supporting their work through live performances and the simultaneous sale of merchandise, this model is difficult to translate into film or books, which have no clearly viable analogues in the context of free digital distribution. Participation in a reputational economy of honoraria, fellowships and sometimes-lucrative freelance work offers certain successful creators economic opportunities, but does not present a defined or reliable career path for creators to develop high-quality work.
Producing, distributing and collaboratively developing qualitatively new and challenging cultural work remains at the center of our movement. Free access to all cultural works in their digital form —both mainstream and marginal, historical and contemporary—is fundamental to our work as well. From scientific research to artistic expression to documentation of human rights abuses to the interrogation of entrenched power structures, we aim to make way for a new generation of free and open access to knowledge in the pursuit of a better world.
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