The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"-a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture"-not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement ), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. “That tradition is the way our culture gets made. From the Free Culture Homepage: Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist.
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