Culture Freedom Day is an observance of

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 Free content, open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's origin ...

. It takes place annually on the third Saturday of May. It aims at educating the worldwide public about the benefits of using and encouraging free culture as well as providing an international day to serve as a platform to promote free culture artists.

Free culture

The term "free culture" was originally the title of a 2004 book 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 Harvard ...

, considered a founding father of the free culture movement. Free culture movement is dedicated to creating and making available their art, allowing others to freely use, study, distribute and improve on the work of others. Redistribution of those improvements are of course allowed and encouraged. The free culture movement opposes practices such as copyright extensions and attempts at suppressing the '

fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...

rights' by the traditional

media industry Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets. Broadcast media transmit informatio ...

Celebrations

The first observance of the Culture Freedom Day dates to 2012. It takes place on the third Saturday of each May. The Culture Freedom Day has been inspired by the

Software Freedom Day Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software organized by the Digital Freedom Foundation (DFF). SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and enc ...

, an observance of

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

that has increasingly included elements of celebrating

going beyond just software related issues. It aims at educating the worldwide public about the benefits of using and encouraging free culture as well as providing an international day to serve as a platform to promote free culture artists. The first 2012 celebrations took place a week ahead of schedule, on 11–12 May in Lisbon,

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

. As of May 16, 2012, celebrations were planned in 16 countries worldwide. Culture Freedom Day is organized by Digital Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that also promotes software freedom. The event is supported by the Creative Commons organization.

References

External links

{{Commons category, Culture Freedom Day
culturefreedomday.org
Recurring events established in 2012 Intellectual property activism May observances Unofficial observances International observances

Free culture

Celebrations

See also

References

External links