A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

If an animal steals your camera and takes a photo that subsequently becomes world-famous, there’s bad news: the US Copyright Office has ruled that the picture can’t be copyrighted - so anyone can use it for free.

That means that a row between the British photographer David Slater and Techdirt, a blog that focusses on copyright issues, over who - if anyone - owns the copyright to a “monkey selfie” is settled for now: it’s not Slater.

by Samuel Gibbs - The Guardian