May 7, 2020
Dr. Barbara Bollier
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Dr. Barbara Bollier
Entry #3: Free Culture
Bollier writes about the Creative Commons Licenses in Viral Spiral, which comes from the movement of free culture: sharing information to the commons for free and being able to freely modify the media. This movement lets the Internet have vast information about everything and anything for free. Thanks to this movement we have Wikipedia and other open sources. Free culture is the complete opposite of a business and anything really related to capitalism. It’s a very hippy and naïve idea because it makes information accessible equally to anybody. However, we live in a world dominated with capitalist mindsets and in order to survive one must eat and your need money to buy food. How is the provider of information to the free culture suppose to survive? Although people seem to volunteer in there free time to sites like Wikipedia, they still have there day job as a source of income. However, this creative sharing movement doesn’t help everyone positively, especially from a monetary perspective. For example, the music industry seems to be affected, because it’s a free ticket for plagiarism of creativity for new ideas. Broadcasting your music or art in the internet without anything in return, someone can come and steal it from you without having to give you credit. Also illegally downloading music has made the music industry lose billions of dollars because people upload the music without licensing.
Theoretically it’s a fantastic idea because it’s free information which creates a culture with more knowledge. Nevertheless, when put in practice it’s a whole other story. I think it needs to be heavily regulated by some higher power. I say higher power because it can’t be regulated nationally, since the internet works globally. Crazy idea: maybe create an Internet government or association, kinda like FIFA is the regulator of professional soccer.
Bollier, David. Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. New York: New, 2008. Print.
"The commons is not a manifesto, an ideology, or a buzzword, but rather a flexible template fortalking about the rich productivity of social communities and the marketenclosures that threaten them."
David Bollier- Growth of The Commons paradigm http://www.scribd.com/doc/27333114/Understanding-Knowledge-as-a-Commons-Theory-to-Practice-2007