The first version of the Free Culture Manifesto is up on the freeculture.org wiki. It’s adapted from the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons Manifesto, which has been around for a while now.

The idea is essentially this: technology offers us a new and liberating way to connect to each other. There’s no need to be passive consumers of information any more. There’s no need to pay people like the RIAA to control our culture. There’s a potential for people to interact with society in more ways that aren’t mediated by consumption. Here’s the manifesto.

Free Culture Manifesto, v1.0

The mission of the Free Culture movement is to reclaim our culture from corporate control. Our goal is to defend free and open cultural space and protect public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation.

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 has reached the point where they trump any and all other rights of the consumer and society.

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; with 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 will fight to make everyone understand the value of our common wealth, evangelizing for Linux and the open-source model. We will resist repressive legislation like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which threatens our civil liberties and stifles innovation. 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.

We won’t allow the RIAA and the MPAA to cling to obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation and market dominance. We will be active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production, made possible for a brief instant by the technology of the Internet, before it is locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a top-down, corporate intranet — if we allow the old paradigm of creation and distribution to reassert itself — then that window of opportunity will have been closed, and we will have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.

The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2004 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.