13.00 hrs: Free Culture Brunch Club
16.00 hrs: Public Debate
20.00 hrs: A Winter Night’s Free Culture Tale (walk in: 19:30)

FREE?! investigates one of the great paradoxes of our times: While the fast paced development of digital media and the Internet has made the sharing and reuse of cultural products, like movies, music, books as well as their tools of creation, extremely easy. Yet at the same time, this same technological development allows intellectual property law to increasingly enclose culture behind privileged walls, thus tightly controlling and policing its access. Meanwhile, the debate that opposes the rights of authors and file sharing has been stifled into a virtual trench warfare.

Is there a way out? FREE?! attempts to answer this question by looking at the alternative offered by the free culture movement, both exploring its potential and the obstacles it encounters.

The concept free culture refers to all forms of cultural expressions that have been deliberately ‘freed’ by their legitimate authors from the limitations that current intellectual property law, such as copyright, impose on them. Free culture promotes the free distribution of works and tools to create the lowest threshold possible for the access and transformation of culture for an audience as broad as possible. To do so, free culture operates as a nested territory, in which different forms of cooperation and collaboration establish working environments and modes of production that are based on sharing and exchanging knowledge. This requires a new approach to the production, financing, distribution, and appreciation of culture. It is in this particular context that FREE?! explores the potential and limits of this alternative.

The program divides into three sections:

The Free Culture Brunch Club: a series of roundtable discussions around key themes that affect free culture: entrepreneurship, copyright reform, publishing, documentation and archives, crowd funding, and tools ownership and appropriation.

A public debate about the position of creative entrepreneurs in the context of free culture and the fast paced development of digital media communication. With, Bruno Felix (Submarine), Ton Roosendaal (Blender), Jamie King (VODO), moderated by Felix Stalder (World Information Institute, Vienna).

A multifaceted public evening program where the domain of free culture is explored guided by a Winter Night’s Copyright Fairytale, and where the audience is actively involved in the co-creation of ‘free culture’.

FREE?! is organised by Kennisland in cooperation with the Willem de Kooning Academy, the Piet Zwart Institute, WORM, Creating 010 and The New Institute. FREE?! Is made possible with support by the Culture Programme of the European Union and the Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industrie.

Date: Friday November 29
Start: Free Culture Brunch Club: 13.00 hrs / Plenary debate: 16.00 hrs / Evening program: 20.00 hrs

Location: The New Institute, Rotterdam

More information: freeculture.info

Extra: a WORM-up event, in the form of a three days workshop, will be held in Rotterdam at WORM, the institute for avant-garde recreation, the 13, 14 and 15 of November. The workshop, open to public registration within the limits of available places, will challenge the very notion of free culture by looking and mapping its different systems of transaction.