Free Culture: The Future of Creativity, Collaboration, and Knowledge Video

Elizabeth Stark of Yale University gave this lecture in March of 2010.  Intellectual Property is talked about first and how the idea of property is usually a tangible thing but in the digital age it has changed.  Copyright is how people make sure that the things that are their Intellectual Property cannot be taken and used by others.  But once the copyright expires then it becomes a part of the Public Domain for all to use and access.  Yet as our foray into the Digital World continues our ideas behind copyright are reforming because information sharing has become easier.  The sharing of thoughts and ideas has become a public consumption process through the use of collaborative technologies like Blogs, Wikis, Google Docs, and Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing.  Digital Media has given us the chance to be a part of something and work with others no matter where they are in the world.  This gives us the power to spread our message throughout the various media strands therefore reaching everyone on a larger scale than we have been able to do before.   But those that use other peoples copyrighted digital work are still considered by some to be stealing.  So they began Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent others from sharing someones work without permission.  Fair use enable us to take parts of a piece of copyright work and use them for education, parody, criticism, research and commentary without having to ask permission. But in today's day and age people are creating open source materials for everyone to use, share, and modify as they see fit.  It has become harder to put restrictions on the Digital World and our ability to collaborate and share what we have created with others.