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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
essential for 21st century our culture is becoming increasingly digitized and intellectual property is an oft-disputed domain. this book is absolutely essential if you have any concern towards media and policy regarding said media.
A lucid, thoughtful defense of moderation in copyright law and preservation of the public domain It is indicative of the widespread misconceptions about the nature and purpose of intellectual property law that Bill Gates could get away with so foolish a statement as to conflate the open source movement with communist dogma. And it is to such misguided notions that professor Lessig responds with this work. The issue at stake with the current debate on copyright, Lessig contends, is not a simplistic battle of unrewarded creators against thieving pirates, as the content industry would have us... more info
Free Mickey This is a must read as the issues that Lessing addresses have implications that go way further than the entertainment industry. I agreed with almost all of his argument although I did find at some point he was pushing it BUT overall he makes a righteous argument and I choose that word "righteous" carefully. This is an issue that effects all of us in everything from education to health care and his arguments resonate in these times of wars for oil and legalized dope dealing by the health care industry.... more info
A must-read for anyone interested or concerned about copyrights This book is not only a history lesson on copyright, but it shows how big corporate enterprises obtain and used material, through the same methods they now want to deny the general public, in order to get to the powerful presence they are today. Example: Disney using lots of old fairy-tales which were in public domain. And today they fight for everything never to go into public domain in order to keep profit to themselves, while at the same time going after creative use that would expand our culture... more info
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