HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Permission culture is a term often employed by
Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvar ...
and other copyright activists such as
Luis Villa Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who worked as Deputy General Counsel and then as Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously he was an attorney at Mozilla, where he worked on the revision of t ...
and
Nina Paley Nina Carolyn Paley (born May 3, 1968) is an American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips ''Nina's Adventures'' and ''Fluff'', after which she worked primarily in animation. ...
to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased. This has both economic and social implications: in such a society, copyright holders could require payment for each use of a work and, perhaps more importantly, permission to make any sort of
derivative work In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in fo ...
. Lawrence Lessig describes permission culture in contrast with
free culture The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...
. While permission culture describes a society in which previous creators or those with power must grant people permission to use material, free culture ensures that anyone is able to create without restrictions from the past. An example Lessig cites in his book, ''
Free Culture The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...
'', is photography. In this example, if the legal environment surrounding the early stages of photography had been stricter with what constituted ownership and leaned more towards permission culture, photography would have developed in a drastically different manner and would be limited. An implication of permission culture is that creators are blocked by systemic procedures and this discourages innovation. Requiring permission in this sense means that creators will have to prove their usage of material is fair, even where legally unnecessary, which is a process that some would decide not to continue. This term is often contrasted with remix culture.


See also

* Chilling effect (law) *
Orphan works An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details ...
*
Copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
* Free content *'' Good Copy Bad Copy''


References


External links


Free Culture
by Lawrence Lessig

from the New York Times (2004) Political neologisms Copyright law {{law-stub