Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity

Lawrence Lessig

Penguin, 2004 - Political Science - 345 pages

From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), 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.

What people are saying

Review: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

User Review  - Matthias Ferber - Goodreads

Clear, readable, and provocative, but for some reason I couldn't get all the way through. Might try again at a later date.

Review: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

User Review  - Patrick - Goodreads

A little dated by now but still a must read for anyone in a creative field or anyone who is interested in copyright and PI laws and how they affect our culture.

Contents

• INTRODUCTION: 1
• Creators: 21
• Mere Copyists: 31
• Catalogs: 48
• Piracy: 62
• Chimera: 177
• Harms: 183
• Eldred: 213
• Eldred II: 248
• CONCLUSION: 257
• Us Now: 276

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
• Author: Lawrence Lessig
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Penguin, 2004
• ISBN: 1594200068, 9781594200069
• Length: 345 pages
• Subjects: Law / Media & the Law; Political Science / General