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if you're going to use my work in a commercial product, I fully expect to be paid.

Consider a case in which your work will be distributed as free software and/or free cultural works. By these definitions, downstream reusers of free software and free cultural works have the right to distribute copies for a fee. From what initial source of revenue should your payment come?

Amazon also has a policy against "Content that is freely available on the web, including content with open/public copyrights." This appears to forbid free cultural works from its platform. Do you consider it an acceptable tradeoff to be exposing your child to all proprietary video all the time, knowing that your child will be forever barred from ever creating anything substantially similar to anything he has seen on Amazon?

Yes.

Amazon also has a policy against "Content that is freely available on the web, including content with open/public copyrights." This appears to forbid free cultural works from its platform. Do you consider it an acceptable tradeoff to be exposing your child to all proprietary video all the time, knowing that your child will be forever barred from ever creating anything substantially similar to anything he has seen on Amazon?

Jehovah's Witnesses carefully refer to the gratis literature of their publisher Watch Tower as "without charge" because Watch Tower publications certainly aren't free as in libre. In fact, in 2012, Watch Tower became infamous for asserting its copyright against parodies of a skit from its animated series Become Jehovah's Friend. (This was the "Sparlock" incident, if you follow that.)

Nor does "free" mean zero copyright. A work in the public domain is free, but a copyrighted work is also free if its copyright owner offers it under a license meeting this criteria.

Perhaps if you consistently refer to gratis distribution as "without charge" in a work, it may be easier for readers to understand your explanation of the difference between that and free.

the only copy of a wedding video, fresh from the camera, stored on windows and because ohh ahh copyrighted music for which the owner does not permission is in the background

Next time try planning ahead and encouraging a policy to play only free music at weddings in your extended family.

2. Clean Energy: Someone Else's Wealth.

How so? Buy a solar panel, mount it on your roof (or on a pole if local safety regulations make it easier), and harvest your own clean energy.

6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: Someone Else's data collection.

How so? If you want, you can install a Gapps-free ROM on a Nexus phone.

8. High-Quality Online Education: Someone Else's knowledge

You assume that nobody puts the course material under a license for free cultural works.

...that no employer will ever esteem as highly as a degree.

What employer? In the gig economy, a high-quality education will include a course on how to be an independent contractor.

11. A New Space Age: Someone Else's patent.

Unlike copyrights, patents expire.

So what's the way to fund creation of free content with comparable production values to the popular non-free content?

amazingly, there are open source games.

I can think of a couple practical problems with porting such a game.

1. First, a lot of these "open source games" have only the program available under a free software license, with the assets remaining under "all rights reserved" terms. Doom (1993) is in this position, as shown by the DMCA notice that Id Software's parent company sent to Mozilla Corporation about a JavaScript port thereof.
2. Second, on the whole, a game with both a free program and free assets is likely to be less attractive than a comparable proprietary game due to the lower production values associated with a project that had to be done in spare time due to lack of revenue. Gratis without libre is easy; libre without gratis is not solved to my knowledge.

there are also games in this nice thing called the public domain.

True, but these games aren't video games. The copyright term in Slashdot's home country is 95 years for pre-1978 works and works made for hire, and any game that old would have been developed before the invention of microprocessor-driven video games in the mid-1970s. But if the intended suggestion was to port a classic board game to Android, I can accept that.

<sarcasm>And enough with books and music and television and movies. Everyone should stay in their basement and never expose themselves to anyone else's creative works, much less celebrate them!</sarcasm>

I think 110010001000's idea is supposed to be that people are supposed to write their own "books and music and television and movies", put them under a license intended for sharing, and celebrate them instead of celebrating proprietary works. It's like e-sports: people take up a proprietary video game as a sport and then act all surprised when the game's publisher wants to tax or even shut down tournaments under its exclusive right to perform the work publicly. This realization about e-sports is why I quit the Tetris fan community in June 2012 after learning of a successful lawsuit by The Tetris Company.

Sharing stories and celebrating them is a fundamental part of human interaction.

Then do so within the boundaries of the law. Instead of misappropriating the industry's productions, make your own with proverbial blackjack and hookers.

Huh? Is there some rule that anything symphonic must have been written over 100 years ago?

"Symphonic" refers to a composition for orchestra or concert band in usually four movements, with the first in sonata form.

But I think the rule that people are getting at is that the composer has to have died over 70 years ago. Or in the United States, the sheet music needs to have been published more than 95 years ago or before 1923. Until the music belongs to the people, it's a "commercial product" more than it is "art".

Why is their not room for both the open and closed cultures?

Assuming s/their/there/:

Because the concentrated non-free media use their vast financial resources to lobby governments to make existence harder for free culture.

Big media uses copyright to squelch competition. It has successfully lobbied for successive extensions of the term of copyright, which reduces the chance that a work will enter the public domain while it remains culturally significant. It uses copyright claims to squelch comment on its works and "similarity" claims under copyright to interfere even with creation of original works, as you have no way of telling whether the song you wrote infringes the copyright of some other existing song out there.

Big media uses its massive selling power to convince viewers to purchase player devices designed to play only works created by sufficiently large commercial enterprises, giving it a captive audience. These include such as video game consoles (with their code signing), Blu-ray Disc players (with the requirement of an AACS license for BDMV), home Internet service plans (with their bans on running a home server, enforced through carrier-grade NAT or TOS disconnection), and AM and FM radio receivers (governed by scarce exclusive licenses to transmit). Furthermore, there exists only a finite amount of electromagnetic spectrum. Case in point: People commuting to and from work who are unwilling to pay for expensive cellular data plan have only AM and FM radio as means of discovering new music. When was the last time, for example, that you heard free recordings of free music on radio? (Here, by "free" I mean distributed under a license conforming to the Definition of Free Cultural Works.)

Big media even controls elections. All major U.S. television news outlets share a corporate parent with a major movie studio: CBS is Paramount, ABC is Disney, NBC is Universal, CNN is Warner Bros., and Fox is (duh) Last Century Fox. This gives them enormous power over name recognition, both in campaign contributions and in "in-kind" donations of name recognition through news coverage. It also helps them control what issues voters feel are important to them, as they tend not to report on threats to the existence of free culture unless it's something extraordinarily high-profile like Wikipedia's PROTECTIP protest blackout of 2012.

Please define "free culture"

If you got a certificate error when viewing the link that I posted above, here's another link to the definition of a license for free cultural works using cleartext HTTP.

I wonder how hard it'd be to take The Open Bay and turn it into a "LegitTorrent" site centered around works under a Creative Commons license or other licenses for free cultural works. Such a site would promptly respond to OCILLA notices to help discover uploaders that have been engaging in license laundering.

There have been a number of "free" movies made, or movies pre-funded by crowdsourced funds.

I'm aware of the Blender Foundation's short films. But when I put crowdfunded movies into Google, followed by crowdfunded free movies, I didn't see any feature-length films that were made free as in free culture, such as CC BY or CC BY-SA, after the film was funded and produced. Am I missing something?

Who would have thought getting free music would have caused such an uproar?

Major label music is not free music.

especially since it doesn't look like they've released the game assets?

Like DuckTales, Star Wars is a Disney franchise, and Disney is famous for sponsoring the Copyright Term Extension Act. I can't foresee what would cause Disney to change its policies to allow the release of anything it owns under a license for free cultural works.

CC-BY-NC-SA is not open source, not by the traditional definition of open source. The NC part of the license is the problem. Open Source licenses should permit commercial redistribution, and this is in fact part of the first criterion given in the definition of an open source license:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

(emphasis added) The NC portion restricts selling the manual. It isn't a free cultural work either for the same reason.

What are you talking about? Art and text of Wikipedia are licensed under the CC-SA-Attribution. There is no ND/NC restriction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

The text of Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

Re-use of non-text media

Where not otherwise noted, non-text media files are available under various free culture licenses, consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy

Free Content License
        A license which meets the terms of the Definition of Free Cultural Works specific to licenses, as can be found at http://freedomdefined.org/Definition version 1.0.

http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

To ensure the graceful functioning of this ecosystem, works of authorship should be free, and by freedom we mean:

        the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
        the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
        the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
        the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

What are you talking about? Art and text of Wikipedia are licensed under the CC-SA-Attribution. There is no ND/NC restriction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

The text of Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

Re-use of non-text media

Where not otherwise noted, non-text media files are available under various free culture licenses, consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy

Free Content License
        A license which meets the terms of the Definition of Free Cultural Works specific to licenses, as can be found at http://freedomdefined.org/Definition version 1.0.

http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

To ensure the graceful functioning of this ecosystem, works of authorship should be free, and by freedom we mean:

        the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
        the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
        the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
        the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

Hi! I invite you to read this explanation why NC licenses are problematic.

Most software is akin to industrial machinery, to make your universal machine (a computer) work like a particular machine.

Games, however, are much closer to culture - like books or novels. Raise your hand if you put a priority on making sure your cultural consumption meets the free cultural works definition. Anyone? ...

So if you want most games to be free software, you have to shift that cultural attitude. Good luck! Let me know how that works out!

there are few enough A-grade open source games

The problem here is that there's no money to be made from free video games, which in the present capitalist system of things means no way to put a roof over the developers' heads and food in their children's stomachs apart from a bounty system like Kickstarter. Though selling support works for some kinds of business software, games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher. Furthermore, the game consoles tend to have explicit anti-copyleft policies. See previous posts by jcnnghm, turbidostato, and alexo.

If it weren't for pirating children in poor families would never be able to be even one-tenth of cultured

Then the problem isn't piracy. It's that the popular culture can be made non-free. Ideally it'd be possible to work around this by creating works and distributing them under a license for free cultural works. But the RIAA labels, MPAA studios, major professional and collegiate sport leagues, and other publishers of non-free popular culture collude with the traditional media (largely radio and television) to keep free works off the air. And no, the general public is unlikely to switch to Internet radio because a smartphone capable of receiving Internet radio is much more expensive per month than a dumbphone and an FM radio, nor to Internet TV due to monthly download caps that MPAA-affiliated ISPs such as Comcast have started to impose.

Sorry, got a bit confused by your use of "cultural work", which is what books with expired copyright generally is called.

In the United States, books with expired or abandoned copyright are called "works in the public domain". The term "cultural work", as seen in a page linked prominently from all WMF projects' file upload pages appears to refer to any work of authorship that's not a computer program, as the licensing issues for computer programs and other kinds of work are very different.

Hasten the obsolescence of these "middlemen" by promoting and developing replacement technology

Replacement technology whose makers will inevitably draw lawsuits from the big incumbent publishers for "inducing" copyright infringement. It tends to happen every time there's such a disruptive development.

Become politically relevant.

I send letters to my representatives, and I get back a form letter claiming that the draconian laws are in the best interest of America, which just reinforces my belief in how strongly bought my representatives are. I vote, and my preferred candidate loses. I try to spread word of mouth about my preferred candidate in those few venues I know of that haven't already put up a complete ban on political discussion, and nobody appears to show any interest.

Make them fear you by providing a threat of being voted out of office for not representing your interests.

This doesn't help for people who happen to live in a district whose representative has a "fairly safe seat" for one of the two largest parties.

Support and promote open-source/free technology and content.

"Content" referring to works of authorship other than computer programs, I assume. What's the business model to fund the creation of entertainment works with professional production values to be distributed under some license for free cultural works?

How does this license compare to the recent (similarly-named) OSHW license? Do these groups know about each other?

I'm looking for some free total conversions for GPL Quake 1-3 to try on my computer. (Assets from retail Quake aren't free.) Which do you recommend?

people are constantly stealing their content and then slamming them for protecting it.

The movie studios are notorious for taking from the commons without giving back. Walt Disney Pictures especially is known for adapting films, often right after they go out of copyright (such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book), and then closing the barn door behind it by not only successfully lobbying for successive legislative extensions of the term of copyright in all works published during the existence of the company but also acting like it owns the original work and harassing smaller studios that make their own adaptations. Case in point: Disney owns a trademark on "Pinocchio" for dolls, so good luck selling toys based on your own film adaptation of Collodi's novel. Disney has also sued GoodTimes Entertainment over "trade dress" rights in the packaging of its direct-to-video adaptations of the same stories that Disney had adapted.

Publishers of proprietary computer programs such as Apple also own copyrights. But some Slashdot users have a better view of Apple and tolerate its action to defend its copyright in Mac OS X (Apple v. Psystar) in part because Apple does charitable work by contributing to Darwin, WebKit, and select other free software projects. If the major record labels and major motion picture studios were to do some analogous pro bono work* by releasing some of their back catalog under a license for free cultural works, Slashdot users might have a better opinion of them.

* That's pro bono, not pro-Bono.

The problem is that those apps are more buggy, not free, not compatible, etc

Did you mean "free" as in free speech or free beer? If free speech, then the works on the site probably aren't free either. If free beer, then what's the big difference between having to pay for a specific app to read a site and having to pay for an account to read a site through standard web protocol?

So in order to refute this Georgia school's idea that file sharing is overwhelmingly infringing, we're trying to establish that free cultural works have a substantial audience.

By definition, you have to be in traditional media to get [an Oscar or Emmy].

In that case, how do you recommend to make an award for free cultural works equal in prestige to the awards for traditional media?

(Similar to how the "best sellers" racks at your local store won't mention stuff they don't carry.)

Then how should one measure popularity of a work other than sales?

It's a free world, if someone wants to restrict their work, they should have the right. If you don't like their system, start creating things and put it under some type of free license.

Creating works and putting them under a license for free cultural works stops working once the incumbent publishers of non-free works cry plagiarism. George Harrison got sued for this and lost.

This is not so much "My information shouldn't be free" but "stop using my works for profit when the license explicitly says for non-commercial use."

Works under non-commercial licenses fall outside the definition of free cultural works. For this reason, they are not allowed on Wikimedia Commons.

total FREE software user [...] My movies even come to me legally via netflix.

Netflix Watch Instantly is not free software. Nor are most of your movies free cultural works, more than likely.

If you're referring to traditional encyclopedias, they exist, but they're not free.

Textbooks that aren't licensed freely are a luxury. If there isn't yet a good free book on a given subject, whose fault is that?

I believe he's using the conventional definition of freedom. I don't know what definition you're using...

You're going to goto work the next day and tell your co-workers / friends how much you enjoyed it! Thats free advertising for them.

Then what's the free alternative to House MD?

What makes you think that corporate programmers are necessarily going to do drudge work better than volunteers?

Because programmers aren't the only people that contribute work to a product. Name three well-known video games made entirely of free software and free cultural works.

LINUX has SOFTWARE REPOSITORIES, did I mention this?

The software repositories associated with major desktop Linux distributions, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, have a drawback: not all applications, even useful and legitimate ones, satisfy the licensing requirements of the repositories. For example, almost no major label video games are completely free software and free assets.

Is it still my fault when the systems as a whole are engineered stupid?

Yes, because you chose non-free, engineered-stupid music instead of Free music.

You are describing the precise reason people get behind open source software.

I can see two roadblocks to the widespread use of free software as a response to the deployment of strong digital restrictions management. The first is that there often isn't affordable hardware on which to run free software. What handheld device do you recommend for running a free software stack? What set-top device? And will peripherals such as printers and scanners still support free operating systems, or will they start to have encrypted wire protocols the way Nikon started encrypting the white-balance data in its digital cameras' .nef (raw image) files?

The other roadblock is that computer programs are not the only kind of work of authorship. If someone switches to a purely free, non-DRM software stack, what professional-quality movies and what professional-quality video games will that stack be able to play? So far, the free cultural works movement has performed well at producing nonfiction (such as Wikipedia or training videos) but less well at producing fiction.

Choice 4: Learn to like Free media and choose it over non-free media. If Free operating systems are viable, why aren't Free works other than computer programs viable?

The point is that [well-known companies' software repositories] are at least crptographically signed.

If a malware publisher can buy an Authenticode certificate for $200 per year, what makes you think these repos won't get signed in a way that the less-trained user is likely to trust?

And even if Linux was very popular, most people's everyday requirements would be preinstalled as part of the distro defaults or met from the distro's repos, or the signed trusted repos of large companies like Adobe.

So in other words, developers have to get their software published by either a distro (if free) or a large company (if non-free). But independent video games, for instance, can't go in the distro's repos because making the program and its data free or freely distributable, as required by the distro, would compromise the business model of any video game that isn't massively multiplayer. Developers have to eat, and unlike coders, game artists haven't adopted free cultural works practices in droves. Nor can they go in the large company's repos because large companies compete with self-publishing indie developers.

[Without some of the restrictions Bono argues for,] people would probably contribute music for free, in much the same way they contribute to Wikipedia for free.

Wikipedia is on the Alexa charts, but what Free album have you seen hit the pop charts?

I'm not quite sure what you count as free music

Musical works and sound recordings distributed to the public under a license that meets these requirements. Of the examples you listed:

• Ghosts I-IV: CC BY-NC-SA, a good start but not quite Free.
• The Slip: CC BY-NC-SA, likewise a good start but not quite Free.
• In Rainbows: No license listed on the Wikipedia page.

[Without some of the restrictions Bono argues for,] people would probably contribute music for free, in much the same way they contribute to Wikipedia for free.

Wikipedia is on the Alexa charts, but what Free album have you seen hit the pop charts?

I'm not quite sure what you count as free music

Musical works and sound recordings distributed to the public under a license that meets these requirements. Of the examples you listed:

• Ghosts I-IV: CC BY-NC-SA, a good start but not quite Free.
• The Slip: CC BY-NC-SA, likewise a good start but not quite Free.
• In Rainbows: No license listed on the Wikipedia page.

What makes games special? Why should they be held to a higher standard than drivers, IDEs, spreadsheets, etc?

For one thing, it's fairly easy for free software communities to provide free alternatives to non-free "IDEs, spreadsheets, etc." and even drivers as long as the device manufacturer is willing to play ball. If the next Excel is broken, people can threaten to defect to OpenOffice.org Calc. In fact, Mozilla did just that to Microsoft by developing and promoting Firefox as an alternative to the brokenness of Internet Explorer 6.

Games made entirely of free software and free content, on the other hand, haven't seen as much success. What's the Free alternative to, say, Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Animal Crossing: City Folk or Modern Warfare 2?

But if the produced material sucks, you're stuck wasting your money on something that isn't any good.

Which isn't any better or any worse than the copyright model. That's why there's trademark: so that an author can build a reputation. But the approach of a bounty for publication under free terms has the advantage that it 1. allows for fan works, 2. precludes the possibility of accidental infringement (like the infamous "My Sweet Lord" case, Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), and 3. reduces legal fees.

A growing number of textbooks come with online extras available only to those who buy the book new.

You are right. I should have made a clearer definition of DLC to only mean non-free DLC.

Unless you're talking about Wikibooks featured books, the DLC provided with a textbook is non-free. Otherwise, people could copy the DLC when they resell the textbook.

No, because that's not free content.

SoundExchange collects royalties for all music. Not just its members. so yes, you'd still have to cough up.

And if you don't cough up for your station that plays only Free music, what grounds will SoundExchange or anyone else have to sue you?