Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
Synopsis
Lawrence Lessig, andldquo;the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet eraandrdquo; (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and canandrsquo;t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
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.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
"PIRACY"
Chapter One: Creators
Chapter Two: "Mere Copyists"
Chapter Three: Catalogs
Chapter Four: "Pirates"
Film
Recorded Music
Radio
Cable TV
Chapter Five: "Piracy"
Piracy I
Piracy II
"PROPERTY"
Chapter Six: Founders
Chapter Seven: Recorders
Chapter Eight: Transformers
Chapter Nine: Collectors
Chapter Ten: "Property"
Why Hollywood Is Right
Beginnings
Law: Duration
Law: Scope
Law and Architecture: Reach
Architecture and Law: Force
Market: Concentration
Together
"PUZZLES"
Chapter Eleven: Chimera
Chapter Twelve: Harms
Constraining Creators
Constraining Innovators
Corrupting Citizens
"BALANCES"
Chapter Thirteen: Eldred
Chapter Fourteen: Eldred II
Conclusion
AFTERWORD
Us, Now
Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples
Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea
Them, Soon
1. More Formalities
Registration and Renewal
Marking
2. Shorter Terms
3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use
4. Liberate the Music - Again
5. Fire Lots of Lawyers
Notes
Acknowledgments Index