Re: [Librefm-discuss] Libre.fm as the central place for obtaining free music

[Rob Myers]

On 03/03/10 04:08, George De Bruin wrote:

Let's not forget that free songs are often copyrighted, but that
Libre.fm will never be allowing nonfree materials for download.
    

Yes, but what is your definition of free? 

 http://freedomdefined.org/Definition gets my vote as well.

What freedomdefined doesn't go into is *why* this definition is good. It's obviously derived from the Free Software definition [1], but culture ain't software. The reason it works for culture as well as software is that both cultural works and software are texts, legally speaking. And copyright law is used to try and restrict our use and production of such texts [2], which affects our freedom of speech [3]. We can use alternative licencing to protect our freedom of speech as it applies to those texts and is challenged by copyright and other legal measures.

[1] - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] - http://www.chillingeffects.org/
[3] - "Code is speech" - http://www.eff.org/victories/

- Rob.