Free culture
Free culture in the software developments world can be associated with free software and open source: everybody should have the access to the source code and have the right to modify the code according to their or the society’s needs. As Richard Stallman said: “Without source code the software has no value”.
Besides open source software movement there are other projects around that carry the “free culture” spirit. There is such a organisation called FreeCulture.org, that connects students and young people who have the mission to introduce the free culture movement to their peers. The organisation was founded already at 2004 and since then has been connected with several projects (althougn mainly only in North-America).
The manifesto of the freeculture.org states:
The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure.
We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption.
One project they initiated “Pledge to Boycott DRM” was about to pledge to boycott CDs with DRM (Digital Rights Management). DRM is basicly about limiting the usage of digital media. The CDs with DRM could only be played on certain players, so that people couldn’t make illeagal copies and easily share the music with the rest of the world. For example the big companies came up with CDs that could not be played with Windows Media Player. Since 2002 many law-cases have been handled about the DRM policies and due to that companies started to give up using DRM. EMI was the last one to say in January 2007, that they have stopped publishing audio CDs with DRM.
Anyway, about the project now. Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson from FreeCulture.org stated: “I will pledge to never purchase a CD containing any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will do the same.” The campaign was highly succesful and alltogether 4562 people signed up (it’s 9 times the people they expected to sign up). They could only achieve these because of the community - students and young people wanted o express their feelings against the DRM policy and were ready to sign their name on the public website. This all happened when the topic was still hot and I’m pretty sure this project somehow helped to make the next step towards the DRM-free world.
It’s interesting that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has also pointed out his thoughts about DRM and music. Apple and Steve Jobs are in opinion that music should be DRM-free and that’s why the popular iPods an iTunes support the music that is encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.
The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.