An Oral History of Free Culture

First, a preface: consider this more oral history than anything else. I wasn't there this whole time. I haven't done super deep research. I'm just writing down my recollections and feelings over time. If you want to really dig in, you probably ought to try and get an interview with Lawrence Lessig (though I suspect his mind might be on constitutional crises at the moment. Did you know he was played by Christopher Lloyd on West Wing? On one hand I'd be offended if someone 30 years older than me were cast as me in a tv show, but if it gets to be Doc Brown/Uncle Fester, maybe...) or Cory Doctorow for actual experts. Because of the nature of this, I figure I'll open it up as well. If you want to contribute to the page, have a correction, or something similar, send me an email. Tekk (like the domain) [at] sdf dot org. Name your favorite free culture license to put your contribution under ;)

I've thought about writing a post about the death of Free Software for a while on and off. Well, the death of Open Source and the irrelevance of Free Software if we're talking more accurately. There've been some posts hinting on it I think like the software aesthetic, but nothing in depth. We have plenty of people talking about that though, so I can put it off longer. When even Bruce Perens is writing and working towards post open source it's pretty clear the train's already left the station. I also hit 30 this year (2025) so I'm permitted some nostalgia. So I figured I'd hit on a more niche topic that I think is even more lost: the Free Culture movement.

What The Hell Is A Free Culture? Some Context

I got into Free Software around 2009. First I just switched to Linux (I had a tradition of learning new things as a 'gift' for my birthday, and Linux was up that year,) then looked into some of the philosophy, spent a bunch of time reading through the GNU web site, and got into the whole free software look. A part of that was, for me, trying to only consume free culture which was, at the time, a thing. I feel like that's pretty much disappeared and nobody's talked about it but there was definitely A Moment somewhere in there.

I say that to give some of the context in which I experienced this jump. To be clear I think I got on the train right around the peak of both free software and free culture in this general spirit I'm going to call Web Optimism. There was this sense at the time that the Information Wants To Be Free people had won.

Pirate parties were winning seats in legislative bodies in Europe, Apple (then the world's defacto music seller with iTunes before Spotify came around,) gave up on DRM in music in 2009, I don't think that Amazon ever had DRM on their music, at least not by the time I bought MP3s from them. DVDs had been cracked years ago, Bluray DRM was broken within a couple years of its wide distribution, UEFI Secure Boot and TPM chips were years away. Microsoft was an old dinosaur, the future was Google who gave away all of their products for free, to the whole world, for everyone. Google and Firefox were pushing the web forwards with marketing campaigns to get people to drop Internet Explorer.

It's hard to really capture the feeling at the time, but to hit on some of the core ideas: The future was free and global. This universal, instant access to information and other people on the internet was going to fix a vast majority of the world's problems. How could you be racist when you could be interacting with people from China or Africa or Argentina right now, learning about their everyday lives? How were you going to fall for conspiracy theories when you had all the tools you needed right there to debunk them? Everyone was going to be connected and have all the world's information at their fingertips. Wikipedia was crowdsourcing (now that was a buzzword,) the entire planet's knowledge into one project anyone could edit and correct.

Not even factual information either. The idea that people should be able to share art as they liked had traction, not even in indie stuff. The late 2000's saw both Trent Reznor and Radiohead release entire albums under Creative Commons licenses. You could legally torrent a grammy nominated album in 2008. You could download Cory Doctorow's latest novel (and I did, god did I love Little Brother, For the Win too, I still greet my parents' literal chickens with Hullo Chickens,) from his website. I checked, you can't anymore, at least not that I can see. He deserves your money anyway. For what it's worth I did what people said would happen: I read the e-book for free and then I paid for it because I loved it. There was this sense that free content to grow your audience and either some light ads or donations from fans were how projects would be supported. Kickstarter launched the notion (in the public consciousness at least,) of crowdfunding in 2009. Nobody needed a record label or a movie studio or a publisher, artists could interact directly with fans and make what they all wanted with no middle men.

That is to say: this is probably the only time in modern history when I could've eaten good on media that was completely free to share over the internet. Of course on the corporate end it was terrifying, you can bet that this zeitgeist was one of the major pushes behind moving to the current everything is streamed and we will refuse to sell you anything.

So what was there? How'd you look at it?

This section is a little aside to look at the perks. Because the whole point of this movement was to make things shareable, I figure I can both talk about what discovery was like and some of the stuff I had.

In my opinion the best program available at the time was something called Miro, which was put out by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which now focuses on subtitles it seems. It was a video player, a torrent client, and an RSS reader combined into one and most importantly came with a bunch of bookmarks. Those went to websites like VODO, a distribution platform whose entire gimmick was full movies distributed via torrent, and legaltorrents, which did what it said on the tin. Both are now completely gone.

On these sites you could just click the magnet link and Miro would queue up the torrent, then once the download was done you could play the video right in Miro. It also supported subscribing to youtube channels via RSS, which was new at the time. Youtube didn't support HTML5 video until 2010, and even then as an experiment only on newly uploaded videos, so the vast majority of youtube videos required flash or downloading and watching after. Miro offered a way to subscribe and watch videos without needing flash, which was important because gnash never supported Youtube very well.

For music, at the time libre.fm (also now defunct,) had a radio option with freely licensed music, Jamendo had a large catalog of usable music as well, though it's pivoted since. Grooveshark also (as far as I remember,) had a big collection of Free Culture movement and a way to filter down to it, I think?

So finally, what was some of the free culture stuff I got my hands on?

Movies:

TV(I don't think any of these were actually creative commons? But it's what I watched at the time):

Music:

That pretty much covers what I remember. There was a lot more music spread around, and I did a lot of discovering through libre.fm. I even almost contributed to it, but the copyright assignment got lost in the mail (hey mattl if you're reading this what's up?) I think that would've been my first ever contribution to a software project which wasn't one of my friend's.

What Happened?

Man, asking me to summarize cultural trends without research. If I had to pick a year off the top of my head I'd say 2013 happened. Really though, the 2010''s in general happened. Aaron Swartz was killed, the Snowden leaks revealed the gigantic surveillance apparatus behind all of this free information and free services as well as the enthusiastic consent of tech companies in it. There had been this perception of the internet and the web as a fundamentally good thing that would bring everyone closer, but also a sort of wild west where anybody could make it and it was almost its own country and that was shattered. Platforms consolidated: through much of the 2000's surfing the web was still a thing. By the end of the 2010's we were firmly in the 5 websites whose content is exclusively screenshots of the other 4 websites era. Going to an artist's web site for their new release or reading their blog was thoroughly dead.

Finally, I think, the key was that piracy became a solved problem with the move to streaming, and these platforms were antithetical to the practice of these free culture artifacts. Valve pretty much got proven right: the way that you get people to stop pirating is to provide better convenience at a reasonable price. Instead of having to buy/rent a DVD to watch a movie, you opened Netflix on your iPad and you could start watching right now, not wait hours for a torrent to download. You didn't have to be on the lookout for new music, Pandora (and later Spotify) would let you listen to as much as you wanted and constantly recommend new things. If you're a musician, your songs need to be on Spotify. How's someone supposed to share and remix your song if it's on spotify streaming only? You can't (I think?) even advertise yourself on other platforms where they could download and remix what you made. Want your movie on Netflix? I doubt they'd license it if you could also download it for free from your website. Later on in the decade the first adocalypse hit Youtube. It was suddenly no longer viable to post your movie for free and take in the ads because revenues collapsed and anything deemed not family friendly often got cut off from ad revenue entirely. In short, the ecosystem and the mood of culture as a whole just turned away from the optimism required to keep the movement going, I think.