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Free Culture

How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

By Lawrence Lessig

(50)

| Hardcover | 9781594200069

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Book Description

A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

4 Reviews

2 people find this helpful

Not against copyright

...but for the freedom of sharing, spreading culture and creating derivate works whilst respecting copyright. Lessig explains very clearly why the current copyright system is flawed and proposes some interesting changes (both for "you" as user and content creator, and for "them" the law system). All ... (continue)

...but for the freedom of sharing, spreading culture and creating derivate works whilst respecting copyright. Lessig explains very clearly why the current copyright system is flawed and proposes some interesting changes (both for "you" as user and content creator, and for "them" the law system). All extremes are carefully avoided: Lessig manages to be credible, to explain the problem and to convince you of how wrong "eternal" copyright could be.
Very interesting. Recommended!

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Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein said on Dec 1, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Many do not understand what copyright or the public domain are about. Let alone what creative commons means. The aim of creative commons is to build a reasonable copyright on top of the extremes that reign today. They go beyond fair use and complements copyright. I fall into the category of those wh ... (continue)

Many do not understand what copyright or the public domain are about. Let alone what creative commons means. The aim of creative commons is to build a reasonable copyright on top of the extremes that reign today. They go beyond fair use and complements copyright. I fall into the category of those who use CC to express the importance of a balance in the debate. I wanted to get to the source of this debate and found Lessig’s work (and presentations) very interesting.
This book, Orwellian at times, is about Free cultures (cultures have a great deal open for others to build upon) and I like it’s style. Not too academic, but yet loads of sources mentioned. A few practical examples, which lead up to an argument to support Lessig’s case to explain how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.
A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. Although one can see this book as merely a derivative of Stallman’s essays, as Lessig puts it, I found this book – about the effect of the Internet beyond the internet itself- very valuable and insightful. Lessig, fighter against the piracy of the public domain, writes (argues) against extreme points of view on copyright and calls for a balance. A balance between norms, law, market and architecture (put in order by me).
Just a few great wordings:
Policy makers should not make policy on the basis of technology in transaction. They should make policy on the basis where technology is going.
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future.
We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back and rediscover what we forget.
Read about RCA’s AM empire, the Causby’s (with a nice land/air ownership example), Doujinshi and Eastman, Grimm and Disney, something relatively new and something really new, the statute of Anne and the way back machine.
American copyright started with a very narrow scope: it covered maps, charts and books. Now it covers nearly any creative (tangible) work. But i was stunned how much “Dark content” (Kevin Kelly attrib). is around, most of which has no commercial value (but the owner is not known; we are talking about 95% of the content here). Not sure how this American (born a pirate nation) copyright compares to the EU of Dutch position. But I do feel more ready to understand some of the recent debate by the EU on copyright and the internet.

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Jw van Eck said on Aug 21, 2011 | Add your feedback

Section 3[return]Innovation

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Jonaschau said on Jul 18, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

A serious study on the detrimental effects of the excesses of copyright protection on our culture, including a brief history of copyright in the US and hints at several possible solutions that would help promote a free culture without depriving content creators of their due.

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Ian Atrus said on Jul 15, 2009 | Add your feedback