The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content, using the internet as well as other media. The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement argue also hinders creativity. They call this system “permission culture”.
The ideology of free culture and progressive copyright law were originally initiated as the protection of imaginative culture-producers from legal threats of corporations who did not allow employment of their art or commerce.
Today, the term stands for many other movements—hacker computing, the access-to-knowledge movement and “copy left” movement, etc.
Students for Free Culture, is an international student organization working to promote free culture ideals, such as cultural participation and access to information. It was inspired by the work of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who wrote the book Free Culture, and it frequently collaborates with other prominent free culture NGOs, including Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. Students for Free Culture has over 30 chapters on college campuses around the world, and a history of grassroots activism.
Freeganism is an anti-consumerist lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on “limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources”. Freegans “embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.“ The lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters, known as dumpster diving. Freegans salvage the food for political reasons, rather than out of need.
