Information Society Watch

September 2006, David M. Berry & Giles Moss, First Monday

The Creative Commons organisation has sought to introduce cultural producers across the world to the possibilities of sharing, co–operation and commons–based peer–production by creating a set of interwoven licenses for creators to append to their artwork, music and text. In this paper, the authors chart the connections between this movement and the early Free Software and Open Source movements and question whether underlying assumptions that are ignored or de–politicised are a threat to the very free culture that the project purports to save. The project of ‘free culture’ is committed to the creation of a cultural space, rather like the ‘public domain’, seeking to complement/replace that of proprietary cultural commodities and privatised meaning. The authors conclude by suggesting a new discursive project linked to notions of radical democracy (Adapted from author).

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