Jeffrey C. Long

Been needing to post this for some time. Have an extended rant on the subject coming someday soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to post the Free Culture book site so that you can download it and read it if you want.

The topic is the importance of elements of culture being available to build upon freely. For example, Walt Disney built upon the stories of the Brother’s Grimm. Those elements of culture were available for him to freely build on.

I am inspired by the free culture movement which includes activities as diverse as designing the operating system Linux (see the free book The Cathedral and the Bazaar) and trader friendly music (see the websites db.etree.org and bt.etree.org)

The two keys that excite me the most about free culture are collaboration and distribution. By freeing your intellectual property to be used by others you enable collaboration that would not otherwise take place. And similarly by freeing certain forms of your intellectual property to be distributed by any means possible, your content can be more widely distributed. Neil Gaiman is another example of freeing some of his property. If you are interested in making money off of your property, you can do what Neil does and the trader friendly bands do: make some of your property freely available, while others retain copyright. This allows the viral qualities of the net go to work to distribute your content as widely as possible, and act as a living advertisement for your paid products.

So, check out the resources. I think this is an exciting topic and has some interesting implications for the church which I’ll consider another time.