The Social Science Research Network has published a paper by Dan Hunter entitled Culture War. The first 13 pages deliver a tremendous account of the origins and current state of the Free Culture / Copyright Reform movement that started around 1999. I wanted to get a link out to this, primarily because it's a great read, but also because it is laden with footnotes to the point where it could be used as a reference for major events and milestones in the movement.
The thirteenth page wraps up the background portion of the paper and ends with the following paragraph, which sheds a little light on the title:
This is the nature of the culture war which is currently being waged. Unlike the conflict between the left and right in US politics which is often called the "culture war," this isn't a war between cultures, but a war over our culture. Who owns it, who controls it, who can use it in the future, and how much will it cost? For the first time since intellectual property began its inexorable expansion there are signs of popular discontent at just what the private interests had taken from the public.
Once a thorough background is provided the paper then attempts to refute the oft-cited claim that the "Lessigist" Free Culture movement is fundamentally Marxist by showing that all efforts in this area have been around reinstating regulations on IP, not removing IP entirely:
[The premise of the FC movement] is the recognition that private property systems function better if some limits are placed upon property ownership and the market; otherwise the market will consume itself.
The last part of the paper is undoubtedly the most controversial. It states that unlike the "Lessigist" Free Culture movement, the Free/Open Source Software movements and their spawn in other creative forms like Wikipedia, South Korea's Ohmynews, The Distributed Proofreader's Project, and the blogging phenomenon are indeed fundamentally Marxist and can only be classified as revolutionary. All of these new forms of content creation and distribution remove the defining role of capitalistic systems - the dominant intermediary between producer and consumer that provides capital funding and controls/owns distribution and reproduction.
The standard justification of intellectual property, the reason that it's supposed to exist at all, is that without intellectual property interests no-one would have any reason to produce cultural, creative content. Any creator would undertake a rational calculus, recognize they will get nothing without property rights in their intellectual activities, and go off to become a tax attorney. But the open source movement shows that this fundamental justification simply doesn't hold: many people will produce creative content even outside what we can think of as the capitalist underpinnings of intellectual property. It's a small step to go from this to a Marxian revolution: the open source movement promises to put the means of creative production back in the hands of the people, not in the hands of those with capital.
And again, I want to note that there are a total of 130 footnotes with links and citations to other works that together define the ongoing war on/for creative culture.
The paper is available as a PDF document at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=586463
Via boingboing.