Freedom as in a Self-Sustainable Community: The Free Software Movement and its Challenge to Copyright Law

Abstract

Copyright law, together with the market logic it carries, penetrates deeply into our daily life. The copyright regime is so restrictive that it turns a normal learning process into a series of potential copyright violations. The Free Software Movement (FSM) represents a substantial community effort to counter this trend. It seeks to supersede the copyright regime by offering the ‘Copyleft’ licensing mode, which facilitates the formation of a cooperative, resource-sharing community. The FSM has been so successful that it has challenged the utilitarian values presumed in copyright law, has fuelled widespread reassessment of copyright law, and has influenced many who engage in various creative activities. Claiming to bear similar values, Creative Commons (CC) provides licensing models for people to waive some rights granted to them. However, CC differs from the FSM in significant ways. Most notably, the flexible CC licensing model weakens the firm philosophical and political ground which binds FSM advocates together. Hence, although CC's rapid growth seems to signal its success, it is questionable whether such success is as enduring as the FSM's, or if it is leading to a different result. While CC champions the author's freedom to decide how to use his or her bundle of property rights granted by copyright law, the FSM advocates the freedom to build and live in an alternative, vital and self-sustaining community. The existence of such an alternative model not only allows these particular participants to be independent from the proprietary world, but also may empower the rest of society to imagine different kinds of relationships between human beings and their creative activities.