Free Culture (book)

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This article is about the book; for other meanings of the phrase, see free culture.
The book cover
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The book cover

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1.0) on March 25, 2004. The printed version of the book was published by Penguin Books under full copyright.

"There has never been a time in history when more of our 'culture' was as 'owned' as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now." (pg. 28)

Contents

[edit] Summary

In the preface of Free Culture, Lessig compares the book with a previous book of his, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which propounded that software has the effect of law. Free Culture's message is different, Lessig writes, because it is "about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important." (pg. xiv)

Professor Lessig analyzes the tension that exists between the concepts of piracy and property in the intellectual property realm in the context of what he calls the present "depressingly compromised process of making law" that has been captured in most nations by multinational corporations that are interested in the accumulation of capital and not the free exchange of ideas.

The book also chronicles his prosecution of the Eldred v. Ashcroft case and his attempt to develop the Eldred Act also known as the Public Domain Enhancement Act or the Copyright Deregulation Act.

Lessig concludes his book by suggestion that as society evolves into an information society there is a choice to be made to decide if that society is to be free or feudal in nature. In his afterword he suggests that free software pioneer Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation model of making content available is not against the capitalist approach that has allowed such corporate models as Westlaw and LexisNexis to have subscribers to pay for materials that are essentially in the public domain but with underlying licenses like those created by his organization Creative Commons.

He also argues for the creation of shorter renewable periods of copyright and a limitation on derivative rights, such as limiting a publisher's ability to stop the publication of copies of an author's book on the internet for non-commercial purposes or create a compulsory licensing scheme to ensure that creators obtain direct royalties for their works based upon their usage statistics and some kind of taxation scheme such as suggested by professor William Fisher of Harvard Law School [1] that is similar to a longstanding proposal of Richard Stallman.

[edit] Derivative works

A day after the book was released online, blogger AKMA suggested that people pick a chapter and make a voice recording of it [2], partly because they were allowed to. Users who commented volunteered to narrate certain chapters. Two days later, most of the book had been narrated [3]

Besides audio production, this book was also translated into Chinese [4]. Isaac Mao [5] proposed this project and the finished product was a collaboration involving many bloggers from mainland China and Taiwan.

[edit] Editions

[edit] Organisations

Some of the organisations working to a common goal of promoting free culture:

[edit] External links

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