Last week in Washington, Andrew Keen of Arts+Labs interviewed Progress and Freedom Foundation president Adam Thierer about the “free culture” movement. The interview is divided into three video clips, which are embedded below, along with key points from the interview.

What is “free culture”?
“Information wants to be free,” an early rallying cry on the Internet, is at the core of the free-culture philosophy. Thierer noted that it encompasses an array of ideas, including less stringent copyright rules and open-source software whose code can be viewed and altered by users. But he said radicals in the free-culture movement dream of a “quixotic utopianism” that spells the end of intellectual property rights. “If we don’t have strong protections for certain types of creativity … we are going to lose something in our society and in our economy,” Thierer said.

Who is behind the free-culture movement?
Free Press, started by “the neomarxist academic Robert McChesney,” is the most prominent group in the movement, Thierer said. He said the group has been quite successful in shaping policymakers’ views of “public media” and government control of proprietary networks, among other topics. “They have some fairly radical thinking, and yet somehow it’s become mainstream in this day and age.” Thierer’s take on the push for public media: “It’s a blueprint for a press takeover, and I’m surprised that it’s getting traction” at the FCC, FTC and throughout the Obama administration.

What’s the content solution in the digital age?
The first step, Thierer said, is to make sure government does not worsen the problems of a changing media culture by pursuing “dangerous interventions” such as bailouts and subsidies. Beyond that, government policies need to give media companies the flexibility they need to adjust their business models and survive. Thierer questioned “the crazy quilt of rules” that govern who can do what, where and how. “At some point, these rules have essentially retarded the creation of a new type of marketplace that would allow some of these traditional media entities to survive and thrive.”

[Disclosure: Arts+Labs contributes to Digital Society but has no editorial oversight over the group.]