Public Knowledge preserves the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge; promotes creativity through balanced copyright; and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully.

We live in a world ever more connected and surveilled thanks to digital technologies: the Internet, the world wide web, personal computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, social media, and more. The ability to create, share, and communicate with the others is governed by the combination of both laws and technologies. The Free Culture Movement questions and challenges how technology and law affect who has access to, representation through, and protection within the exchange of cultural works. What dangers lie in private ownership over technology, media, and ideas as it concentrates control over those resources?

The mission of the Free Culture Foundation is to bring an end to the subjugation enabled by private ownership over media, ideas, and technology.

We work to bridge, disrupt, and destabilize the legal and technological digital divides between listener and musician, viewer and producer, reader and author, user and hacker. We strive to empower those exploited through these systems by supporting local and student chapters, providing educational resources, organizing direct action campaigns, and sponsoring select initiatives, projects, and events.

Our rights to connect and communicate — via universally accessible, open, affordable and fast communications networks and devices — are essential to our individual, economic and political freedoms.

Yet these rights — codified in the First Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — are at the mercy of powerful phone, cable and Internet companies and the government agencies they collude with.

The Internet is the foremost battleground for free speech in the 21st century, and protecting our Internet freedom is essential to safeguarding our rights to speak and assemble in private. But the principles embodied in the Declaration of Internet Freedom — freedom of expression, access, openness, innovation and privacy — are under constant attack.