I met Andrea at the London Netaudio '06 event during a coffee table discussion on the topic of Free Culture. Along with his colleague Jonas Andersson they were hosting a very in-depth conversation that challenged my concepts of culture. As a beginning musician I decided to join the movement by releasing my music under a Creative Commons licence. In this interview Andrea tells us a bit about the general idea of free culture and the movement itself.
[Wojciech Franke] Tell me a bit about your background, how did you discover the free culture movement ?
[Andrea Rota] I have a quite mixed background - work as a free software consultant and studies in philosophy, music and social sciences. Everything I've ever produced for my work - code, documents, etc. - has been released under the GNU GPL license and my company has always worked exclusively with free software. Therefore, when I first heard of the Creative Commons project, their licenses seemed clearly the natural choice for creative works. From there, I started exploring the many projects and discussions around free culture. Moving to London for my PhD has helped a lot, since it has been much easier to meet people from other free culture projects.
[WF] You are an active spokesperson for the free culture movement in the UK and throughout Europe, in what direction does the free culture phenomenon expand?
[AR] These are very interesting times for free culture. Some of the ideas behind it have been around for ages, but only recently they gained more extensive coverage and wider uptake. And, most interestingly, with this a range of different issues and positions emerge, with sometimes heated but often very productive discussions. This is very important as free culture is not a one-dimensional concept, as opposed to mainstream proprietary culture, but should be a subject of democratic negotiations to allow alternatives to thrive.
One of the hot topics at the moment, both in activists' agenda and increasingly in wider awareness, is the problem of DRM (digital restrictions management), technical methods to limit freedom of users and to let media corporations invade our lives and decide what we should and should not do with works of art and culture.
It is an hard battle because of the disbalance of power between users on one side and corporations and their lobbies on the other, but a battle worth fighting up to the last breath.
[WF] Have you ever cooperated with any free culture activists from Poland and how dynamic is the movement in Eastern European countries ?
[AR] I have only talked briefly with Marysia Lewandowska, who developed the Enthusiasts project together with Neil Cummings (http://www.enthusiastsarchive.net); the works archived within this project are all available under a Creative Commons license. They have done a great job with this project. However I don't know much about any other free culture project in East Europe.
[WF] Tell us a bit about Creative Commons.
[AR] Their work has been fundamental in bringing to the forefront the need to discuss alternative licenses for creative works; it is important however to bear in mind that CC is only one voice, and certainly not the most radical, within free culture activism.
[WF] Do you think the content industry's position could be endangered in the future by the expansion of CC ?
[AR] If you mean that an handful of incredibly powerful and arrogant media corporations would lose their ability to subjugate culture to their own economic interests, that's exactly what I think should be at the top of the political agenda of free culture.
If you are thinking about how free culture can be economically viable, nobody has a substantiated answer so far, but I'd very much prefer for culture to be free and then figure out how to make it sustainable rather than limiting alternatives a priori for abstract fears of endangering current, objectionable, business practices.
[WF] CC is often criticized for not having a coherent philosophical/ethical base for it's licenses. What is the motivation for freeing culture ?
[AR] I see it very much as a way for the development of alternatives to the one-dimensional mainstream culture. Free culture licenses (and it is now widely accepted that only some CC licenses are completely "free", strictly speaking) are a fundamental legal protection, but free culture is really at the core of any truly democratic process - there is no real democracy where alternatives are not possible and where culture is impoverished and subjugated to partisan interests aimed at creating and preserving inequalities with the excuse of substaining an unjust economic system.
[WF] Tell us how can people experience and benefit from free culture.
[AR] I believe it's not simply a matter of people benefiting from free culture - culture should clearly be free to use, share and build upon, but I see that the relationship can be beneficial also the other way round: free culture can benefit from people - we see how it is endangered every day by a wide variety of attempts to impose arbitrary restrictions, and only if everybody is aware of the importance of free culture we can succeed in protecting it from greedy and anachronistic corporations.
This is far from being easy - the same one-dimensional structure of the current dominant cultural industry serves very well as a way to lock down people's perception of what culture could and should be: probably the most widely spread mistake is to think about ideas and their expression as similar to physical objects. Hence a completely irrational (but unfortunately widespread) clinging to the idea of property. There is no "intellectual property": if you want to "protect" your ideas, just keep them to yourself, don't waste time trying to convince parliaments to change the rules of the game to put restrictions around what should be free.
Creativity and culture are central to human development, and any attempt to lock them down for whatever reason is simply repression of human development potential. What the media corporations call "intellectual property", forging language to serve their interests, is merely "access policy": trying to control who can access what, and therefore to impose an alienated framework over human development.
Links:
* http://www.freeculture.org.uk
* http://www.netaudiolondon.cc
also printed in "Europa" - University of Wrocław
