FYI: This is a series of articles I plan to write to educate people on Free Culture in a casual manner. In the future I hope to translate these articles into Indonesian, but I'll write these in English first.

Free Culture is hard to explain. Especially to people who's been living in the copyright age for so long, they think musicians inherently belong in mansions and actors inherently fly private jets. So I hope this lowly blog post will help you explain Free Culture to your friends.

So, let's begin.

The easiest way to define something is to position it against an opposition, an enemy. And the enemy of Free Culture is Permissive Culture, the culture you are living in now. No matter you are living in America, Sweden, China or Indonesia. You are living in a Permissive Culture.

Permissive Culture is dictated by copyright laws. Let's say, you want to make a video remix of Laksar Pelangi or Transformers? With music tracks from Dewa 19 and My Chemical Romance? And maybe post it on YouTube...

You have to gain PERMISSION from the content creators. You have to gain PERMISSION from the Laksar Pelangi people, Warner Brothers, Achmad Dhani and Reprise Records. You are literally bound by law, to NOT share, copy, edit, use anything from the above list...unless it's PERMITTED by the above people. So if Achmad Dhani sees your really cool Laksar Pelangi/Transformers/Dewa 19/My Chemical Romance video mix? He has the right to a majority your money (what he will define as "damages") [...] Well at least he can argue you for your money in front of a judge in the court of law.

Now in Free Culture, you are FREE to do all of the above. Have Megatron talk to the Laksar Pelangi kids? While mouthing off "I'm Noooooooot Ooooookaaaay!"? And seeing Achmad Dhani spliced into there somewhere? You’re FREE to do whatever you want with content that's available to you, without fear of having Achmad Dhani up your ass with legal papers. You're just FREE.

Now, ok. The above example is horrible. I'll admit that. I wouldn't wanna see an Achmad Dhani related project at all at this point.

However, here's a more true, moving example.

The cure for Cancer.

Cancer is a deadly disease, make no bones about it. At it's most violent form, one can die in days. In it's most benign form, it kills you in agonizing decades. Contrary to what some hardcore alternative medicine people believe, modern pharmaceutical companies ARE trying to find the cure for it. And paraphrasing from "Rip! A Remix Manifesto" here, they are coming up with ideas to combat cancer every day. The sad truth however is that this progress is slowed. Slowed by PERMISSIVE CULTURE.

Ok, imagine you are in a lab. You have a great idea to cure cancer. It involves a combination of Drug A, Drug B AND Drug C. You submit your proposal to your hospital, grant givers, etc. And you set out to do your experiment. Once you do your ground-breaking experiments however. The Drug C people stop you, because you haven’t secured the rights to use that drug in your specified manner. In other words the Drug C Company DOESN'T PERMIT YOU to find the cure cancer (using their drug). The Drug C Company just indirectly said, YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO CURE CANCER!!!

In Free Culture however, all is hunky-dory. You are FREE do your experiments, FREE to fail a bunch of times, FREE to waste 40 years of your life and FREE to finally do it (synthesize the cure for cancer) in your death bed and FREE to die without pharmaceutical companies harassing you with their NON-PERMISSION talk.

So there. Very clear.

PERMISSIVE CULTURE would halt the cure for Cancer because of "copyright"

FREE CULTURE lets you find the cure for Cancer quicker because of...umm..."copyleft"

I guess in conclusion:

Free Culture > Permissive Culture

^^,

Ababil Ashari

p.s thanks Gumi, yr an inspiration. Also Pandu Nurdiansyah and this dude. and this girl for the image I used!