A Free Culture Has Been Our Past,

A Free Culture Supports And Protects Creators And Innovators. It Does This Directly By Granting Intellectual Property Rights. But It Does So Indirectly By Limiting The Reach Of Those Rights, To Guarantee That Follow-on Creators And Innovators Remain As Free As Possible From The Control Of The Past. A Free Culture Is Not A Culture Without Property, Just As A Free Market Is Not A Market In Which Everything Is Free. The Opposite Of A Free Culture Is A "permission Culture" -- A Culture In Which Creators Get To Create Only With The Permission Of The Powerful, Or Of Creators From The Past.

Now That Copyrights Can Be Just About A Century Long, The Inability To Know What Is Protected And What Is Not Protected Becomes A Huge And Obvious Burden On The Creative Process.

But, Like All Metaphoric Wars, The Copyright Wars Are Not Actual Conflicts Of Survival. Or At Least, They Are Not Conflicts For Survival Of A People Or A Society, Even If They Are Wars Of Survival For Certain Businesses Or, More Accurately, Business Models. Thus We Must Keep I Mind The Other Values Or Objectives That Might Also Be Affected By This War. We Must Make Sure This War Doesn't Cost More Than It Is Worth. We Must Be Sure It Is Winnable, Or Winnable At A Price We're Willing To Pay.

We Live In A World With "free" Content, And This Freedom Is Not An Imperfection. We Listen To The Radio Without Paying For The Songs We Hear; We Hear Friends Humming Tunes That They Have Not Licensed. We Tell Jokes That Reference Movie Plots Without The Permission Of The Directors. We Read Our Children Books, Borrowed From A Library, Without Paying The Original Copyright Holder For The Performance Rights.

In A Time Of Polarized Politics There's One Thing That More Than Ninety Percent Of Americans Agree On, That Our Government Is Broken, And Broken Because Of The Money In Politics.