Lecture Review - Week 7

This week the topic for New Communication Technologies is free society free culture and Creative Commons. The lecturer states that there are three key words when considering this topic; community, collaboration and choice. The website creativecommons.org began in December of 2002. This non-profite organisation set out to promote reasonable copyright. Creative Commons allows standard licences and tools to be availible which enable creators to create their works easier. This organisation also allows creators to have 'some rights reserved' instead of 'all rights reserved'. Every creator is allowed a choise of one of three options when considering copying and distributing work. These three options are; NonCommercial, No Derivatives and ShareAlike.

Moving on, Free and Open Software started the movement to voluntarily relax copyright laws. Software is run by a thing called a source code. A source code tells a computer what to do by using programming languages. Software has always been free which allowed anyone to share and use the source code. This idea of free software first came to light when a man called Richard M stallman began the Free Software Foundation in 1981. Stallman aimed to create a system that was made up of free software. Stallman also created four principles when dealing with free software:
1) The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
2) The freedom to study how the programs works, and adapt it to your needs.
3) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
4) The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.