Much later, a quarter of a century ago, Lewis Hyde published his book, also titled The Gift, an ur-text that sits on the shelves at Harvard College and in the tents of Burning Man. In it, Hyde argues that there are aspects of life that are not best organized by a marketplace of currency exchange—artistic practice, customs of birth and death and relationships, and teachers’ gifts of knowledge. Hyde was primarily writing about “the gift” in the context of literature and folk culture, but the notion flows into other contexts as well.

Around the same time that Hyde’s Gift was published, some people started thinking about how the gift economy, and the exchange of ideas and the building of reputation and name rather than capital, related to software. These were people like Richard Stallman, the founder of Gnu, now President of the Free Software Foundation, who has long believed that it was improper to refuse to share information with someone who needs it. Stallman famously said that free culture means free as in “free speech,” not “free beer.”

Originally, the ideology of free culture, and its more sedate policy-oriented sibling, progressive copyright law, were a way of protecting imaginative citizens from the dauphins of Disney and the mammoth record labels and the like, who would not let artists and writers and citizens employ the dauphins’ images or songs in their art or commerce. Free culture was meant as a check on the excessive capitalist zeal of entertainment conglomerates that would otherwise lock up all their daughters, from Jane Austen to Snow White. The term was originally the title of a 2004 book by Lawrence Lessig, but it came to stand in for other movements as well—hacker computing, the access-to-knowledge movement, and the “copyleft” movement, among others.

Legal scholars like Lessig broke ground with their arguments for looser, “progressive” copyright law, writing books and targeting some of these corporate interests. The Creative Commons was founded, a nonprofit organization that worked to increase the body of work that is available to the public for “free and legal sharing and use.” The Creative Commons began offering what are called CC licenses: licenses that allow others to copy and distribute a person’s work provided the copiers give the originator credit. Creative Commons licenses are intended for those who don’t want to depend on fair use, says the CC’s Fred Benenson. (Wikimedia is soon to adopt CC licenses for its collectively created property.)

But the institutions dominating the copyright debate are different than they were in even the recent past. The tide has turned. Free culture once defended culture producers against corporations. Now, free culture may well threaten the small culture-producers themselves. That’s because so many people produce their own intellectual property, often unaffiliated with institutions and corporations, that these “little guys”—freelancers like Mannie Garcia—are the ones being appropriated from.

Free culture has also become a more pertinent term within journalism. Clay Shirky, a scholar at NYU, wrote about it recently in an adept essay on the future of media. He asserted that it was the “real world” of media, printed on paper and bought and sold, that had become sci-fi. “Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception,” he wrote. “Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario.” In Shirky’s essay, some of the technologically-enabled media types like himself wonder out loud how things would be different if old-school newspapers and newsmagazines were financially healthy. Would they bother sniping at free culture? They suggest that these journalists and others fail to understand that free culture isn’t the thing that is killing them: the market is. The old-school types were only imagining that the devils of recession, cheap Web ads, and Craigslist are the fault of free culture. Fred Benenson scowled at the AP, saying it was a “copyright bully” that is “hurting its own brand” by going after Fairey.

On the other side, the AP appeared to be positioning itself as the punisher, lobbying for payment from aggregators of original content, setting its sights on Fairey and then Google for aggregating AP content on Google News. The AP also threatened a “news blackout”—meaning that if Google didn’t strike a fair deal with the AP, Google would not get AP copy. The AP would also try to redirect users away from secondary sources that post the AP’s original content. In the mosh pit of punditry, old-school journalists started lashing out at what they see as “freeloading” Web types, their arguments falling like so many angry emoticons. Michael Moran, for instance, who runs the Council on Foreign Relations’s Web site, recently vented in The Nation about “Internet thinkers like Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, who have elevated the ethos of free information to unreasonable heights.”

Who’s right? And why couldn’t they come together to find a new way to support journalists? Could requisite attribution be part of the solution? Attribution might be—here’s a wonderfully icky word—monetizable for individuals, especially the growing number of freelancers producing original content, and thus it is significant. The beleaguered newspapers and The Associated Press are not looking for attribution but for money to support their newsrooms. Content given away for free undermines their ability to survive, as they see it. On the other hand, there is so much to be said for free access to materials that we can use in our writing and in our images. After all, in order to write this, I am benefiting from free sources—published newspapers that are available online. And yes, my own work can be found at alissaquart.com (feel free to visit after reading this!).