This essay was written as part of my sociology studies at Auckland University. It concerns the intersection of free culture and liberalism, meaning the modern political movement.  Some knowledge of that concept may be useful before reading the work.

Introduction

This essay will examine the concept of free culture and how it relates to liberalism. Liberalism is not a set, fixed concept, but rather has varied considerably over its history. It has evolved through a number of periods: classical, or laissez-fair liberalism dominated in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries; embedded liberalism held sway after the Great Depression until the 1970s and neoliberalism has been omnipresent from that decade until the present day. Within these variants of liberalism there were still further, more subtle variations (Richardson, 2001, chap. 3). Free culture will be examined against elements from aspects of liberalism across its history. The work will describe free culture, and examine the similarities between this concept and the grand, overarching themes generally present in all forms of liberalism, and go on to describe any discrepancies with these themes. It will analyse how and why free culture arose, how liberalism features in that event, and how and why the two interact currently. It will assess the drive and motivation to participate in free culture projects, how this relates to the drives and motivation in liberalism and how inclusive it is. There will be analysis of the ideology of ‘freedom’ which underpins free culture, and the reality of how it is practised.

Free culture – genesis

Free culture is a concept which suggests all creative works should not morally be owned and controlled by individual entities, whether for economic profit or any other reason (Stallman, 2002, p. 15).

Liberalism brought about the enclosure of various areas of previously common land, used for acts such as grazing cattle and growing crops; as the land was enclosed, so they were forced to pay exorbitant rent ¹. Capitalism has driven this enclosing, or privatising, of a slew of previously commonly-held and -used assets, first in Western Europe, later spreading to the rest of the world during the colonial period. So it was also with copyrighted works: the US government devised copyright in the eighteenth century, to allow for creative works to be owned by their creator, solely under his or her control as for any other chattel (Woodmansee, 2007).

Traditional copyright as we know it today is thus a somewhat artificial concept, created as a means to allow the extraction of surplus from creative works. At the time of its inception, the period of copyright was limited to 14 years from the date of publication, thus allowing a reasonable profit to be made and hence encouraging the production of creative works, whilst demonstrating the government’s understanding of the part cultural works played in wider society.

After this 14 year period, the work would have all protections afforded by copyright law removed, and it would become public domain, thus effectively owned and controlled by the commons. Traditional copyright law suggests that the creator of a work is solely responsible for its creation, however anything more than a casual glance reveals that any work is necessarily at the very least heavily influenced by other creative works, and thus society as a whole. The succeeding pieces would not exist without the work of their antecedents, thus potentially rendering the notion of a single creator redundant, and a gross over-simplification (Stallman, 2002, p. 11).

This situation remained more or less the same until the late 20th century, when the owners of creative works, such as Disney, Sony and Warner Brothers ² lobbied the government to increase the term of copyright, which currently (2010) stands at 95 years, and is set to be extended further – there is a somewhat cynical observation in the free culture community, that whenever Steamboat Willie (an early Disney cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse) is about to come out of copyright, Disney merely lobbies congress to extend the term of copyright (Sprigman, 2002).

Embedded liberalism in the form of Keynesianism had, amongst other things, brought about the state ownership or regulation of critical infrastructure of many Western nations; in particular, the US telecommunications company AT&T was heavily-regulated by the American government from the 1920s onwards. The charter of this organisation called for it to maintain Bell Telephone Laboratories, a ‘blue-sky’ project division, which would undertake somewhat leftfield ventures, not necessarily with any immediately obvious commercial use. Thence Unix, the computer operating system, was born in the 1960s ³. Initially a minor side project, it later developed into a major force in IT, but as AT&T was a state-owned organisation, it was forced to give it away to non-profit institutes such as the University of California and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who assisted AT&T by providing fixes for bugs, and also modified the code to suit their own purposes (Garfinkel, 1994, p. 8; Wayner, 2000, p. 34). As Keynesian liberalism came crashing to a spectacular halt in the 1970s, so governments around the world began selling off their assets. AT&T was privatised and, freed from its charter of the state-owned days, started charging universities for licences to use UNIX – now a mature, sophisticated and powerful system underpinning many large organisations. Much to the horror of various researchers, lecturers and students who had previously worked without recompense on the system, AT & T also refused to hand over the source code, leaving the users at the whim of developers, who were now under the cosh of commercial profits, to make the changes they required. This angered various programmers and academics, amongst them Richard Stallman, who under the guise of the GNU project was motivated to create a clone of Unix, free for all to use, modify, improve and redistribute (Stallman, 2002, p. 17; Wayner, 2000, p. 42).

Free culture using liberalism

Free culture has been derided as communist ⁴ and socialist by prominent figures, and historically it has generally been associated with the political left (Hughes, 2008; Lea, 2000). However, a more in-depth look suggests it owes much to ideologically pure (but never arrived at) classical liberalism/libertarianism, in its eschewing of state interference beyond establishing a minimal framework to exist within. This minimal framework includes the protection of property rights, through copyright; reliance upon individual contracts, in the form of the licences; extensive use of the law courts (there have been numerous court cases testing the licences, in Germany and the United States – mainly brought by gpl-violations.org (Welte, 2006) and the Free Software Foundation) and radical decentralisation. The reality of liberalism is that it could never exist in its pure form, without destroying the society which it exists within and which is necessary for its survival. As such, it has long relied upon the state to intervene – the areas and extent determined by the type of liberalism, be it the embedded liberalism which constituted the social democratic Keynesian welfare state of the 1930s to 1970s, or neoliberalism and its lobbying of government to enact more and more economically-enabling (and socially-restrictive) legislation. Even during its alleged golden era, in the 18^th century, classical laissez-fair liberalism relied heavily on interventions such as the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws, to provide a framework for the hegemons of the day to operate within, by imposing socially restrictive policies on the masses. Free culture appears to depart from this necessity – the majority of free culture projects request little government intervention or help.

The unfreedom of free culture

Taken literally, the central tenet of liberalism is freedom. Liberal democracies, and the ideologues who argue for their creation espouse freedom for all subjects, freedom to act as they will. Closer inspection reveals an inherent mild hypocrisy of this concept – perhaps it is nothing more than a simple habitus, a way to quickly sum up the ideals of a philosophy, a system, which encourages each to create his own path, his own route to fulfilment. Regardless, there are inconsistencies within its aims. Key parts of liberal ideology, such as property rights, reveal a philosophy with a very proscriptive set of rules at its centre (Latham, 1997, p. 121; Watson, 1992, p. 14), which necessarily results in a certain direction for society. The idea of freedom for all is thus a gross over-simplification; in reality it manifests as freedom for a certain type of person, to engage in a certain set of activities for a certain gain – it is freedom within certain parameters. Respectively, the bourgeois classes to carry out capitalistic enterprise, to gain money and power (Harvey, 2005, p. 6).

Free culture revolves around the licences; they define what can be done with a project, and inform and shape the methods of collaboration (Stallman, 2002, 4; Raymond, 1999, p. 3). These licences can be roughly divided into three groups: GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) and Creative Commons BY variants (CC-BY); Berkeley Software Development (BSD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Apache; Public Domain and Creative Commons Zero (CC0) ⁵.

As can be seen from reading the text ⁶ of the licences (Free Software Foundation, 2008; “OpenBSD Copyright Policy,” 2007; “Creative Commons — Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand,” n.d.; “Open Source Initiative OSI – The MIT License:Licensing|Open Source Initiative,” n.d.; “Apache License, Version 2.0 – The Apache Software Foundation,” 2010), the majority of free culture licences are relatively similar in their permissiveness around rights for the user; the differences occur when developers who modify and re-distribute are considered. The first group listed above is relatively restrictive towards the developer – he or she must fulfil certain conditions in order to re-publish the original product, either in part or in full. The second group similarly has restrictions, but these are far less onerous on the developer, generally allowing the work to be enclosed so long as the original creator is acknowledged. The latter group have no restrictions at all, there are no prerequisites and no limitations on what developers can do. At a casual glance, the third group would appear to be the most liberal, followed by the second – anyone implementing them has little in the way of requirements, thus they are free to do as they wish.

However, the liberalness of the second and particularly the third group itself creates a potential problem in the view of some adherents: free culture (as the name implies) prides freedom as central. The relatively more restrictive licences such as the GPL and CC-BY are allegedly so, to protect the code/data from being “closed-off” or enclosed. This is the process whereby an entity – it could be any, but a big corporation is often seen as the most likely to do this (“License/We Are Changing The License – OSMF,” 2010) – takes a body of work created by a community and makes improvements, but due to the permissiveness of the more open licenses (such as the BSD and PD variety) is not required to contribute them back to the community; the entity has got a free ride from the commons. The popular Apple operating system OSX is perhaps the most high-profile example of this practice, that company having taken a variant of BSD ⁷ and modified it to produce a commercial, closed-source product which has generated millions of dollars in profits. Microsoft (the similarly-licensed BIND utilities), many mobile phone manufacturers (Sqlite) and countless others ⁸ have likewise re-used these products as they see fit. This has caused some ill feeling towards the companies in question, although the more ideologically libertarian members of the free culture community are perfectly content for their work to be re-used in this way. Using a Lockean analogy of land enclosure, the community has not strictly lost anything ⁹, but the gain to the corporations is huge. As a result, by far the most popular free culture licenses are the former group, the least free of them all. This causes some disagreement on virtually every free culture project, with considerable debate over the semantics of ‘free’.

A major difference to liberalism perhaps lies in the stated aims of free culture adherents: Richard Stallman (generally considered the first person to formally define free software specifically, and thus free culture in general) for one, has openly said his aim is freedom for the users, rather than the developers (and a simple analysis of the aims of these two in traditional copyright models demonstrates that freedom for one will generally reduce the freedom of the other), and ultimately a complete blurring of the distinction between the two. In this sense, his ideology appears to fit with what he preaches at a level of action, and the licences he created (the GPL family) sit very well with this notion. This is in distinction to liberalism, as the ideologues of that principle have often espoused the pure principles, whilst when it comes to action and policy, have been more likely to advocate interventionist methods. This was true even during the alleged heyday of Adam Snow-sponsored classical, laissez-faire liberalism, but has become even more so during the neoliberal movement of the late twentieth century. Further, Stallman has said a number of times that his true wish is to remove the necessity for the GPL and similar altogether; it is seen as an interim position, while the free culture movement generates superior alternatives to proprietary works ¹⁰.

In what may be seen as a rather contradictory situation, the text of the GPL is itself released with traditional copyright protections: it can be copied and re-distributed, but not changed (Stallman, 2002, p. 195). This is argued as necessary to prevent developers from changing the text, and then re-applying it to existing works, thus allowing them to be closed-off. In a pragmatic sense it is necessary, but it nonetheless creates a perhaps unfortunate point at which to depart from the overarching ideology.

Capital and Motivation

Liberalism revolves around the notion that each liberal subject is a rational-acting, self-interested individual (Wingo, 2003, p. 43), who will thus behave in ways which provide the best possible outcome for him or her, without the requirement of support or interference from other parties. This best outcome is manifested in the US constitution as being the “pursuit of life, liberty and happiness”. The reality, of course, is that these ideals have been usurped by the never-ending chase for monetary profit, and a cult of individuality which wreaks havoc upon society and the environment. It is also somewhat of an oversimplification, ignoring the effect society has on the individual, who cannot be considered an atomic, isolated entity.

Free culture appears not to operate in the same realm, as products are generally given away for no monetary exchange. There are exceptions to this rule, when developers are individually paid to work on projects, either as employees of a corporation or as individual contractors. This is becoming more common as corporations such as Google and Redhat realise the cost to them of writing code which is then given away to the commons, is significantly less than the gain to them of improving an already high-quality product and using it as a platform for other services. Applying a Marxian analysis of value, as there is no artificial monopoly (for, as discussed earlier, this is what copyright is), exchange value must tend towards labour value – i.e. the rate of profit has dropped as far as it can, and there is no surplus extracted by those who control the means of production (Marx, 1946).

This lack of reward for effort appears to turn on its head the entire notion of actors working solely to increase their own value. Kohn and Kilmister found that explicit reward for carrying out some act has little motivating factor; in fact it often serves to demotivate the individual concerned, by turning a potentially pleasurable act into a menial chore (2007; 1980). A task, such as creating a piece of software, composing a piece of music, or writing a book can be viewed as reward in itself, by fulfilling a desire ¹¹ through being creative. This notion is further explained through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This theory suggests that individuals require a variety of needs, the most basic being the physiological necessities of life (breathing, food, water et al), followed by longer-term safety (of: employment, the family, health, property) (Maslow, 1943).

The typical liberal ideals would thus appear to lie in the lower levels of the hierarchy ¹². Looking at the results of the studies cited above, it becomes clear that the aspirations, drive and motivation for free culture lie more towards the high end of the hierarchy (the upper two levels being esteem – self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others and self-actualisation – morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving), suggesting a more utopian ideal perhaps in line with what ideologically pure liberalism, and perhaps true Communism, were envisaged as providing.

Further, Raymond remarked upon the lack of monetary reward for free software programmers, and described the mechanism which appears to motivate them as follows:

The peacock’s gaudy tail and the stag’s massive rack of antlers are sexy to females because they send a message about the health of the male (and, consequently, its fitness to sire healthy offspring). They say: “I am so vigorous that I can afford to waste a lot of energy on this extravagant display.” Giving away source code, like owning a sports car, is very similar to such showy, wasteful finery – it’s expense without obvious return, and makes the giver at least theoretically very sexy (2002)

This bears a striking resemblance to Bourdieu’s symbolic capital (1986), i.e. the accretion of status within the community and latterly without, demonstrating that the practice of giving away work is not as altruistic as it at first appears, although as Raymond continued to explain, due to the nature of the licences, this drive for individual gain is necessarily carried out in a more humble and universally beneficial way:

…the culture’s ‘big men’ and tribal elders are required to talk softly and humorously deprecate themselves at every turn in order to maintain their status (2002).

This requirement arises from the permissiveness of the licenses, which allows anyone to take the code, and “fork” the project at any time, and set their own direction – in order to not split the community, all must behave themselves, and not overtly seek praise or individual gain which harms the project. Thus, while free culture engenders individualistic gain and fulfilment, similarly to liberalism, it appears to do so in a way which is not only not destructive to the society in which it is situated, but which it positively benefits.

Continuing the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs analysis, the creators of free culture projects generally are composed of individuals of a certain class and position in society, being otherwise secure from a physiological and safety point-of-view, thus giving them the freedom to spend time and other resources on projects to benefit the commons. Spending time partaking in discussions on free culture mailing lists, wikis and forums, it quickly becomes clear they are predominantly: middle-class; male; well-educated, generally in a technical discipline; without children and have a high disposable income ¹³. While the skills and tools (higher education, generally from university; broadband internet and consumer technology such as personal computers, GPS devices and cameras) used for producing free culture have greatly reduced in cost due to capitalism, more distributive government policy and latterly neoliberal knowledge-economy policies, and thus been somewhat democratised, there is still a gap (often referred to as the digital divide, in the case of access to technology) between those who have, and those who do not. This shows one of the great conundrums of liberalism: anyone can take part, i.e. generally no-one is prevented by law ¹⁴ from taking part in any project, but in reality class boundaries create the same somewhat invisible barrier as they always have in the rest of society.

The One Laptop Per Child project is working to remove this barrier; it is mass-manufacturing a range of cheap computing device, to be used by students with no previous exposure to computers, in developing countries (“One Laptop per Child (OLPC): Mission,” n.d.). The device is wholly open; all software plus the hardware designs are released under free licences. Two million-plus units have currently been sold, to countries including Venezuela, Tonga and Liberia (“One Laptop per Child (OLPC): Children > Countries,” n.d.).

While this project is on some levels admirable, it could nonetheless be seen as involving a certain amount of cultural imperialism – rather than trying to right the Western-imposed wrongs of the past, including colonialism, ever-increasing debt, climate change and structural adjustment, through restoring independence and reducing interference, the educated technocrats of Massachusetts Institute of Technology are imposing the ways of the capitalist, technology-loving West upon various countries. This will hopefully allow them to engage with capitalism in a way which resembles Blair, Clinton and Clark’s attempts to include the underclasses in capitalism in the UK, USA and New Zealand, by establishing an inclusive framework which takes account of cultural differences (Lather, 2009, p. 11). It is salient that the applications installed on the devices are generally in the areas of natural science, including physics, electronics and computer programming. There is little to teach the recipients about the social sciences, or anything which may encourage them to question why they are in the situation they are, and why they must learn to use a computer. This is explained away as “pragmatism” by the leaders of the project, as the vast majority of software coders are interested in the natural sciences, with little to represent the humanities.

Neoliberalism – the system fights back

Capitalism is not a fixed, static beast – the very nature of liberalism allows it to morph as necessary. In the face of threats, it has long twisted, adapted, created and destroyed, all in a bid to survive and continue chasing increasing profits. Any challenges to the system, often created by the system itself, pose a threat, and after a brief struggle, are re-appropriated to further allow capitalism to grow (Deleuze, 1988).

The first reaction to a challenge is often to protect the existing market position, to destroy or discredit the new technology, the new way, the usurper; as free culture has become more prominent and influential, so it has become a target of this behaviour. The old, slothful and set-in-their-ways technology giants of the 1980s and 1990s have set out to discredit free culture, to smear and to scare. Microsoft have variously described open source ¹⁵ as “Communist” and “cancer-like” (Brodkin, 2010). ASCAP, a multi-billion dollar organisation charged with collecting royalties for music copyright holders, has recently stated that Creative Commons is undermining the concept of copyright, and thus stealing from poor songwriters ¹⁶ (Wilson, 2010). These attempts generally prove useful in the short-term to temper the spread of free culture, but latterly it has won the upper hand in more and more situations. Microsoft, perhaps realising its software empire is unsustainable in its current form and that Google and Facebook ¹⁷ pose the greatest threat, has recently declared it “loves open source”, and has sponsored projects to promote various Linux distributions, whilst providing tools allowing the free software community to interface with its own products (Perilli, 2009; Brodkin, 2010; Foley, 2010).

In the above cases, there was apparently little the companies involved could do, bar spreading propaganda to stave off the inevitable – as noted by many commentators including Marx and Beard, technology and progress stop for nothing, be it an insignificant human, long-existing tradition or mighty transnational corporation:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned… (1848).

Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity (1927).

Other attempts have been more successful so far: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, lobbied for by a number of technology companies and enacted by the Clinton government in 1999, amongst other things introduced law (in the name of halting allegedly rampant copyright abuse) which heavily restricted the use of tools and methods employed by various free culture communities (Wayner, 2000, p. 142). In a more overt attack upon free culture, a leaked draft of changes to Czech copyright law reveals a proposal requiring all producers of works released under open licences to prove their ownership to the copyright office (Michálek, 2010). This demonstrates a particular ideological attention to free culture which may significantly stunt the free community in that country, as it adds a potentially onerous amount of administrative work to what are generally volunteer projects. These cases show the apparent willingness of the state to interfere in the market, after intense lobbying by privately-owned corporations – classic cases of neoliberal interventionism, acting against their supposed ideology. In contrast, there is a consistent trend amongst free culture adherents to mistrust interference from the government (perhaps due to the above type of behaviour); Eric Raymond is one of the most vocal in espousing these libertarian principles, but others are noteworthy for taking a similar path, including Richard Stallman (Wayner, 2000, p. 141). Free culture thus seems to actively resist any significant intervention from governments, beyond the setting up of minimal frameworks under a broad ideology. An interesting turn in the 2000s, has been for free culture projects to lobby for the release of various government data sets under free licences; the request usually being in the form of (paraphrasing) “give us the data, we’ll manage and distribute it more efficiently and widely than you can” (“LINZ – OpenStreetMap Wiki,” 2010; “Ordnance Survey – OpenStreetMap Wiki,” 2010; “TIGER – OpenStreetMap Wiki,” 2010) ¹⁸. This appeal coincides neatly with neoliberal/third way policies which devolve responsibility out to non-government groups, thus relieving the government of involvement in a particular area.

Conclusion

Free culture appeared as a product of freedoms created by embedded liberalism, which were then severely restrained by neoliberalism – it is a direct reaction to the enclosure of various cultural artefacts in the name of profit.

To achieve its aim, it has been shown to use the very concepts developed by liberalism. It appears more pure ideologically, although there are still inconsistencies, but in contrast to liberalism and neoliberalism, most are openly acknowledged by their promoters, and explained and understood, if not always fully accepted. Despite (or perhaps because of) free culture’s ideological purity, neoliberal policy has often tried to destroy and limit it, through lobbying government to enact legislation, and instituting media-driven smear campaigns – in the process further revealing inconsistencies between its ideology and practice.

From a motivation point-of-view, free culture uses similar methods to those of liberalism, but without the expense of turning human against human in a mutually destructive relationship, or allowing the vast accumulation of wealth and power by a small slice of the population.

Recently, this latter ideal has been somewhat subverted, as more and more corporations realise that though free culture products provide little possibility for directly extracting surplus, they are very useful as platforms for other products and services – Google for one owes a lot of its success and wealth to a range of free software tools. The flip-side is free culture communities can similarly use the products as a platform; the frameworks (economic and technical) can be used by both sides.

Additionally, it has also been shown that class is as important a divider in free culture as in liberalism, although there are attempts by free culture itself to fix this (and again, neoliberal/third way government frameworks are helping those who can take advantage in this area); they are somewhat in their infancy, a fact revealed by a certain clumsiness in their methods – time will tell how they evolve, and the nature of this inclusiveness.

Bibliography

Endnotes

Free Culture and Liberalism by Robin Paulson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License.
Based on a work at bumblepuppy.org.