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

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

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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.

Review:

"[An] expertly argued, alarming and surprisingly entertaining look at the current copyright wars." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"[A] highly accessible and enlightening look at the intersection of commerce, the law, and cyberspace." Booklist

Review:

"Provocative, and sure to inspire argument among the myriad lawyers who, Lessig hints, are the only ones who benefit from the current mess." Kirkus Reviews

Synopsis:

From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker) comes a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
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About the Author

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. The author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, he is the chair of the Creative Commons project (www.creativecommons.org). A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School, he has clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
writerkathy1, November 4, 2006 (view all comments by writerkathy1)
I like the title, it really got my attention. It made me interested in learning more about the book.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781594200069
Subtitle:
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Publisher:
Penguin Press HC, The
Author:
Lessig, Lawrence
Location:
New York
Subject:
Art
Subject:
Mass media
Subject:
Anthropology - Cultural
Subject:
Technological innovations
Subject:
Patent, Trademark, Copyright
Subject:
Intellectual Property
Subject:
Media & the Law
Subject:
Government - General
Subject:
General Political Science
Series Volume:
TR-03-20
Publication Date:
20040330
Binding:
Hardback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
368
Dimensions:
8.46x5.58x1.27 in. 1.27 lbs.
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