PERSPECTIVES ON COLLABORATIVE MUSIC Hello. In this video, we'll talk about the free-culture movement, which arose as an attempt to apply the ideals of free software and open source to areas of cultural production in a broader sense. As we'll see, this will be important to understand where many of the projects that we'll discuss throughout this course come from, and also to understand our own way of understanding collaborative music. In general, the free-culture movement's goal is to apply the four freedoms of free software to any type of creative product, which can be a work of art, of science, or of design. If we think about a book, this would mean that its content can be used and distributed freely, and there are even cases in which modifying the text is allowed to make new books derived from the first. In this way, we can imagine how to apply this kind of criteria to movies, car design, or even medical patents, just to give some examples. An important figure for this movement is American attorney Lawrence Lessig, who in 2004 published the book "Free Culture", which you can find and read online or in Spanish in this link. This book is fundamental for the subject at hand, because it discusses the need for art and culture to circulate freely, and to resist the trend in the culture industry to privatize everything. Lessig's method is simple. Instead of establishing a copyright model that restricts the user's rights under the phrase "all rights reserved", a model closer to the idea of copyleft is promoted to allow and encourage the partly or fully free use and distribution of culture. For some authors, this translates to allowing their works to be used, altered and copied without any restrictions, while others seek a middle point. For example, someone might decide that their books can be copied freely, so long as it's not for commercial use, or so long as the content isn't modified to produce derived works. We'll explain this in more more detail in the second module when we talk about Creative Commons licenses, but for now I want to highlight the intent to make cultural circulation flexible, in the face of the restrictive rigidity pushed by the private model. A central feature of this focus is that it understands culture as a common good, as in something that belongs to everybody and that is built by the collaborative action of everybody. As you can imagine, this is where the ideals of free software and free culture come together for one this course's main topics, which is collaboration as the motor of shared creativity. A classic example to illustrate this is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which, unlike conventional encyclopedias that are made by a select editorial team and published every certain amount time, is written by millions of people around the world, revised and updated constantly by the readers themselves, and even promotes the constant distribution, translation and modification of its texts. So much so that, to date, Wikipedia has articles in over 300 languages with a huge number of voluntary editors spread all around the world. We should say that this doesn't mean that its articles lack encyclopedic quality or are based on personal opinions. On the contrary, the fact that so many people constantly revise and can edit Wikipedia's articles strengthens its verification mechanisms and helps the information to be reliable. In fact, anyone who wants can become an article editor, and even publish their own texts, so long as they uphold encyclopedic standards. For example, the article we have on screen was written a few years ago by Hernani, and since then has had various contributions and given way to a discussion forum for readers to exchange opinions. In a similar way to Wikipedia, there are many other sites that promote the free sharing of culture. Can you think of any? I invite you to reflect on the many platforms that you use daily, and even consider the way that Coursera itself works. I'm sure you can find many examples of initiatives that encourage free access to culture. For those of you who want to learn more about this, here's a link to— It's time to move on to this video's main course, and talk about how all of these ideas on free software and open source can be applied to music. I'd like to share with you a manifesto called the "Free Music Philosophy", published by Ram Samudrala as early as 1993. In this manifesto he presents a model of distribution in which "any individual has the freedom of copying, distributing, and modifying music for personal, noncommercial purposes". Another important case to mention is Napster, the legendary platform, one of the first sites for massive online music distribution that became famous after facing a legal battle in 1999 ending in its closure, but that sparked strong public criticism about how the music industry works even nowadays. The Napster and musical distribution case was so big for the free-culture movement that Lawrence Lessig himself wrote in his famous book that "the battle that got this whole war going was about music... There is no other policy issue that better teaches the lessons of this book than the battles around the sharing of music". We're showing on screen some of the many sites that currently exist in which you can share music, sometimes in a legal way, and other times not in entirely the best way, but always showing a strong need for sharing music without the restrictions of the private market. Great. In the next videos we'll see various tools, platforms, databases, that we can use to put our ideas about free music to action. In fact, you yourselves will contribute to the free-music community through the activities you'll undertake in the following modules. For now, I invite you to join us for a talk that we'll host with Mexican artists Marianne and Emilio, where we'll talk about how to apply the ideas of open source to art. Thanks, see you soon.
