Culture Emancipation

CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

These definitions of culture that I have read are important to know what free culture is. Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. Culture is communication, communication is culture. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning. A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.


According to Karl Fogel, an open source software developer, author, and copyright reform activist, Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn't have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other's work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world.


The opposite of "free culture" is "permission culture”. Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists such as Luis Villa and Nina Paley to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased.


Moreover, Fogel mentioned that in free culture, you just translate the book, use the song, etc. If I don't like the translation or the film, I'm free to say so, of course, but I wouldn't have any power to suppress or alter your works. Of course, free culture goes both ways: I'm also free to put out a modified copy of your movie using a different song, recommend someone else's translation that I think is better, etc. These are idealized examples, for the sake of illustration, but they give the general idea: freedom takes precedence over commercial monopolies.


Also Fogel discussed, the distilled into a few basic principles, free culture means:


· Artists can use each other’s' work without asking permission. If you're not already convinced that freedom is valuable in itself, read this. Or this. Or this.


· People can receive and transmit art by whatever physical means are available to them. We've got an Internet -- let's not be afraid to use it.


· The distinction between audience and artist is fluid, and should remain so because culture is participatory. Free culture means anyone can engage with art and other works of the mind; however they want, without hiring a lawyer first.


· Artists are paid for what they do, not for what other people do. Artists should be paid up front for the work they do. But charging again for music every time a copy is exchanged, for example, is silly. The musicians didn't do extra work to make more copies, and the copies are transactions between third parties. In the long run, making it harder to share art hurts artists as much as audiences.


· Monopolies hurt everyone except the monopolist. Permission cultures tend to concentrate control in the hands of people who specialize in accumulating control, without doing much to help artists. There's nothing wrong with running a business that deals with art and artists, of course; the problem isn't middlemen, its monopolies.


In the Copyright law of the Philippines, A copyright is the legal protection extended to the owner of the rights in an original work. Original work refers to every production in the literary, scientific, and artistic domains. The Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL), the leading agency responsible for handling the registration and conflict resolution of intellectual property rights enforce the copyright law. IPOPHL was created by virtue of Republic Act No. 8293 or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines which took effect on January 1, 1998, under the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos.


In the Intellectual Property (IP) Code of the Philippines, literary and artistic works include books, writings, musical works, films, paintings, and other works including computer programs


According to Section 172 of the Intellectual Property Code, literary and artistic works refer to the original and intellectual creations protected from the moment of their creation.

The list of literary and artistic works includes the following:

· Books, pamphlets, articles and other writings

· Periodicals and newspapers

· Lectures, sermons, addresses, dissertations prepared for oral delivery, whether or not reduced in writing or other material form

· Letters

· Dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions; choreographic works or entertainment in dumb shows

· Musical compositions, with or without word

· Works of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving, lithography or other works of art; models or designs for works of art

· Original ornamental designs or models for articles of manufacture, whether or not registrable as an industrial design, and other works of applied art

· Illustrations, maps, plans, sketches, charts and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science

· Drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character

· Photographic works including works produced by a process analogous to photography; lantern slides

· Audiovisual works and cinematographic works and works produced by a process analogous to cinematography or any process for making audio-visual recordings

· Pictorial illustrations and advertisements

· Computer programs

· Other literary, scholarly, scientific and artistic works

These laws must be taken into consideration all the time. These laws are violated when these issues simmered until the Internet came, and then they really started to copy others work without giving credit. Copying became physically so cheap as to be almost costless, and yet the laws against copying only got tighter and tighter, as a frightened industry lobbied for longer copyright terms and more restrictions. This is the dynamic that has given rise to the free culture movement. The only fear here is people copy almost everything without in the internet without giving credit to the authors. Actually, authors, photographers and the like are not so selfish in sharing their ideas and pictures, but they always say that people should give them credit if anyone has copied something from them.