Free Culture Coalition

The Free Culture Coalition of Rochester was an RIT student organization which appears to be history since 2006. Anyone with information about the group since that time, please update this listing via Comments or Edit

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
   

2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
   

3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.
   

4. Ours is less and less a free society.

—Lawrence Lessig, 2002. OSKON presentation

"The mission of the Free Culture movement is to ensure the future of a bottom-up, open, participatory structure to society and culture, and to prevent the spread of a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person."

"We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not just consumption. We will not sit at the end of a one-way media tube. With the Internet and other technological advances, the possibility exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on industry connections, but on merit. We seek to make this possibility real."

excerpts from the manifesto

Get "Free Culture" here. We will have a community discussion of this book before the year is out.

*Professor Lessig spoke at RIT on Friday, March 24, 2006. This lecture is now available as streaming video. Options for download are also available.

•The captioned Real Video stream is now up and it can be accessed here: http://blade.rit.edu/TLC/Lessig-20060324.ram

••Real Player is required to view this video and it can be downloaded from here: http://www.realnetworks.com/info/freeplayer/

•For now, the Real Player video is available for download at http://digi.nuwen.net/Lessig-20060324.rm )

•It is also available as a Quicktime file and an AVI file on Bittorrent. Those trackers can be found here: http://kryptonite.rh.rit.edu:6969/ (EDT)

•Read about Lessig's visit in Erhardt Graeff's article for RIT's Reporter Magazine: http://www.reportermag.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/04/07/4435d4c76c7dc

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What does a Free Culture look like?

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2005-11-27 08:46:00   A free culture is one where critics don't just vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a movie but seriously discuss how a movie could be improved — and then someone reads their critique and goes out and does it. —RossHattori

2005-11-27 08:48:53   A free culture is one where artists are paid for making art just as farmers are paid for making food — and where for an artist to control her art's evolution and growth is as unnatural as a farmer dictating how people may eat the food they buy from her. —RossHattori