When the means of production and distribution become available to everyone with a computer and a little bit of creativity, as mentioned before, there become possibilities for building large pools of works that benefit culture. However, under current copyright law, many of the things that users would like to do with these creative works would be illegal, such as sharing or remixing. This is where the notion of free culture comes into play, existing as a present-day “gift economy” (Hyde, 1979) or “sharing economy” (Lessig, 2004). Free culture advocates are using new kinds of licensing that reserve only some of the rights of the author as granted by copyright law, while giving up some rights to the public. The idea is that the author of a specific work should be able to maintain his copyright, including his right to exploit the creative work, while at the same time the public should have the ability to do things like share that work freely, build upon it, and re-share their modified version with the world. Lawrence Lessig wrote a book in 2004 titled Free Culture, explaining this philosophy and calling for reform in limits that copyright laws put on creativity and sharing.

Lessig (2004) states,
For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture. (p. 8 )

Free culture advocates, including scholars, lawyers, writers, artists, musicians, photographers, film makers, and more, are all attempting to shift ourselves away from the permissions culture that we have become, and towards a creative culture of freedom and collaboration.

We can trace this free culture movement to programmer, advocate, and writer Richard Stallman, the leader of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the developer behind the GNU operating system. Stallman began working at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971 as a staff system hacker, a programmer who would improve on computer systems by being clever with code. Stallman describes the AI Lab as a software-sharing community that would freely build upon the work of others (Stallman, 2004). However, in the 1980′s the hacker community at MIT fell apart, and proprietary software became the norm. Sharing was no longer considered acceptable, as software developers used copyright law to justify a closed-system of production and distribution (Stallman, 2004). Stallman came to point where he had to make a decision, either become a part of the proprietary software world, or find a way to make the software-sharing community concept of MIT live on. He chose the latter, determined to create an “free” operating system that could be shared and built upon freely, which would be known as the GNU project. In order for software to be free, it must follow four basic principles, of which price is not one. Freedom is the “free” in free software, not price.

The four principles as stated by Stallman (2004) are,
1) You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
2) You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs.
3) You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
4) You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. (p. 20)

With these ideals in mind, Stallman quit MIT and set out to develop this operating system, which would be known as GNU. He would also develop a license for that system that would echo the principles of free software listed above, which would be known as the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL. In 1985, FSF was set up by Stallman to embrace this philosophy and promote free software development around the world (Stallman, 2004). As parts of the GNU system where developed over time, they were released to the public in pieces, rather than waiting for the whole system to be complete. This allowed for parts of the system to modified and improved over time, before the entire system was even available as a whole. By 1990, the system was nearly complete, minus a final crucially important piece known as the kernel. In 1992, Linus Torvalds’ Linux kernel was partnered with the GNU system, resulting in the first completely free operating system for computers, known as GNU/Linux (Stallman, 2004). The main idea is that users of this free software are enabled to share and modify software code for the benefit of the entire computing world. “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software” (FSF, 2010, Front page). The philosophy caught on, and new programs were created and improved under free licenses at a rapid pace.

Over time some developers have adopted the term “open-source” as an alternative to free software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was formed in 1998 as the main promoter of this view. They focus on the efficiency of the software-sharing model, without the ethical and social concerns of freedom as the reason behind the practice. Many open-source licenses do not require the modified versions to be free software, meaning you can modify the code and then make it proprietary software. The open-source camp is only concerned in making powerful and reliable software, not promoting user freedom and other ethics associated with free software. Stallman (2005) explains in an interview that free software is a movement, while open-source is “more a collection of ideas, or a campaign” (Fourth question). Regardless of these differences, I see both movements as positive for society and the public at large. Both free and open-source software present alternatives to proprietary systems that limit the abilities of computer users, thus giving control back to those users.

The free software movement has now made amazing progress since its beginnings with GNU. As of March 2010, there are millions of computers users on the GNU/Linux operating system (Stallman, 2005), thousands of programs using free and open-source licenses, and 44 different specific licenses available to programmers that comply with the FSF free software definition (FSF, 2010, Licenses), as well as many more open-source licenses that allow software and code to be shared, but do not fit the definition of “free” software. These licensing models present a perfect example of how sharing and collaboration can enrich our cultural economy. By combining the viewpoints of free software and the viewpoints of open-source software, we can see that sharing and collaborative production can not only provide a social benefit to society, but also provide a more efficient model for creating and distributing works. Thus it was realized that these ideals could be applied to creative works other than software, such as images, music, and video, and this is exactly what happened with the introduction of Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses promote the “some rights reserved” philosophy and represent the norm for netlabel music licensing around the globe (Galuszka, 2009). I will outline the basic principles and features behind Creative Commons licenses, which will then be followed by an analysis of netlabels and free music culture on the Web.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, along with a group of cyberlaw and copyright experts, as a non-profit organization that provides “some rights reserved” licenses for authors and media makers (Garlick, 2008). These licenses would give artists a chance to grant users the ability to do more things with their work than copyright law currently allows. CC released their first suite of core licenses in December of 2002, and within a year there were over 1 million licenses in use (Garlick, 2008). The Creative Commons website estimates that by 2008 that number had grown to an astonishing 130 million works in use that are published under CC licenses (Creative Commons, 2010). It is also estimated that approximately two-thirds of these works allow derivative works to be made from the original source material, providing a massive Commons of works that can be re-used, re-interpreted, and re-mixed. Hartmann (2004) states that “the shift away from identifying music with commodity products and towards a community-interaction based framework closely aligned forward-thinking artists with the principles of Creative Commons” (p. 3). These new licensing structures filled a void that was missing for creators to have a choice in how they license their work.

The ability to specify how content can be used, or reused, has provided a launching pad for the growth of remix communities, large databases of content, and a shared music culture reflected in the netlabel model that I will analyze later in this paper. These licenses can give music a long and rich life by allowing it to be shared and reused over time. This new format is promoting the idea of a shared culture, and has completely reinvented the way that a lot of new artists, writers, museums, and musicians, to name a few, are looking at protecting their works.

The Creative Commons website (2009) states,
Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which ‘all rights reserved’ is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Creative Commons uses private rights to create public goods, and offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare ‘some rights reserved’ (Front page).

Many scholars argue that we must invent a new copyright law that rewards creativity without inhibiting new forms of consumption, use or cultural exchange (Poster, 2006; Stallman, 2009; Lessig, 2008; Burkart, 2010). I agree with this view, but the problem remains that major media companies have strong lobbying powers in Washington, making it very difficult to push through copyright reform that would ultimately take control away from large companies. This new copyright law that we wish for will not become a reality anytime in the near future. If anything, we will see the continued trend of extended copyright regulations. However, the point is that authors of creative works now have choices. Creative Commons offers “simple legal and technical tools to publish their content more flexibly than is allowed by ‘all rights reserved’ copyright protection. The tools can be utilized to create a public good—content that is freer to access, share, and remix” (Garlick, 2008, p. 432). These tools are essential for the growth of a free culture of creative works. I will explain the different CC licenses that are available to users before moving on to a case study of netlabels and free music culture.

Creative Commons licenses start by requiring that the work is at least able to be shared freely for non-commercial purposes, and that attribution is given to the original author, signified with “BY” (Creative Commons, 2010). Then one can choose to allow commercial uses of the work, derivative works, and whether that derivative work must be shared in the same way, similar to free software licenses. According to the Creative Commons licensing page (2010), this results in a total of six main CC licenses, including Attribution (BY), Attribution-No Derivatives (BY-ND), Attribution-Share-Alike (BY-SA), Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC), Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike (BY-NC-SA), and Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives (BY-NC-ND). This diverse range of options give authors/artists the ability to choose exactly what rights they would like have associated with their work, while ensuring that the work is at the very least freely sharable for non-commercial purposes. This is the most important right that music users should be granted in the digital age. It is also important to note that Creative Commons licenses are being used for much more than just musical works. CC licenses are now used for certain projects by the White House, Wikipedia, the Public Library of Science, Google, many universities, and of course writers and media makers of all types (Creative Commons, 2010). This is ensuring that millions of works created now are available to our future generations, without the limits and restrictions imposed on users when trying to access, share, and use traditionally copyrighted works.

Now that I have outlined the ideals and history behind free culture and Creative Commons licensing, I will move to a focused analysis of netlabel culture. Netlabels have become what I like to consider the “peer review” of free music culture. They hunt down and filter the best CC artists they can find, and release the music under free licenses that encourage sharing. Before analyzing netlabel culture as it exists today, we must first understand the historical roots behind it, dating back to roughly twenty-five years ago.

Continue to next section (Netlabels) >>

By Adam Porter, 2010.