Free Culture needs Free Software

Fred von Lohmann explains Why Would MS Do Hollywood’s Bidding?:

In sum, it’s classical economics — on one side you have a supplier cartel with market power (Hollywood), on the other side you have several competing technology platform providers (Microsoft, the major CE companies, etc) each eager to get picked by the cartel (and thereby gain competitive advantage over those not picked).

Unmentioned, there is a technology platform (broadly speaking) that is incapable of doing the intellectual protectionist lobby’s bidding: free software.

Fred says “consumers will inevitably lose.” Not if we demand free software.

Get started with Firefox and OpenOffice right now.

3 Responses

  1. […] $100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same. […]

  2. […] This post could be titled “freedom needs P2P” but for the heck of it I wanted to mirror “free culture needs free software.” […]

  3. […] is an old theme: examples from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, and 2012. 2009 and 2010 are absent, but the reason for my light blogging […]

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