Culture of Free has its opponents

May 14 2009 by David Coxon, The Journal

THE world of IT is a fast moving one. New trends and technology come thick and fast, and with every new trend or technology there follows a host of new terms, phrases, acronyms and buzz-words.

One term I’ve heard cropping up more and more lately is the ‘culture of free’. It’s fairly easy to guess what it relates to, but why has it started to appear so frequently now? And is a ‘culture of free’ a good thing, or could it have a downside?

While today’s internet generation may not remember, there was a time when you had to actually purchase browser software. Then one day someone came up with the idea of giving it away free, and a culture was born. What’s more, it didn’t stop at software. Web-based services (file sharing, storage, instant messaging, email and social networks) soon followed suit, and now data owners have started sharing their data freely.

There’s even a ‘Culture of Free movement’, founded by Lawrence Lessig (a lecturer at Stanford University and author of Free Culture). The movement promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works using the internet and other media. Lessig and his followers object to overly restrictive copyright laws, often completely rejecting the concepts of copyright and intellectual property altogether, claiming it creates a ‘permission culture’. Others, most prominently Andrew Keen – an academic, author and technologist – criticise the free culture ideals, referring to them instead as the ‘cult of the amateur’.

When you think about it, the internet is fundamentally built on a culture of free, with all of its knowledge freely available. But, as blogger Leo Babauta, points out, there is an important distinction between ‘free’ as in you don’t have to pay for it and ‘free’ as in you are free to distribute and use the information.

There is a good reason for bloggers, photographers, filmmakers, citizen journalists, musicians, illustrators or authors to use things like creative commons licensing to distribute their work freely. They’re working on the premise that reaching a larger audience may bring returns in other ways.

The big question is this: is there a downside to all this free stuff?

I guess the answer depends on your point of view. Some would argue that when things are given away freely it erodes their value and others would argue that the ‘culture of free’ is eroding the very skills and standards that we have spent decades building up. Unfortunately only time will tell how true that is.

David Coxon is IT manager at BALTIC