The Free Culture Forum released the Declaration on Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age in February 2011 following their second Forum in Barcelona in October 2010. This loose global network of artists, cultural producers, political activists and scholars is spearheading a movement to enable culture to be free for all to express and enjoy and to prevent it from being enclosed through copyright and other regulations that are preventing access to what should be a cultural commons.
In this text, I will assess the state of free culture today by first locating it within the broader movement for the digital commons. I will then look at the first two phases of free culture which centered around technological and legal issues. This sets the context to assess the current phase of economic and institutional experimentation.
The full article is here. A substantially shortened, but nicely lay-outed version is here (pdf, 8.8.MB), as published in the Spring|Summer issue of the Komsos Journal.
