Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control CreativityFrom "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. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
Creators | 21 |
Mere Copyists | 31 |
Catalogs | 48 |
Piracy | 62 |
Founders | 85 |
Recorders | 95 |
Collectors | 108 |
Harms | 183 |
Eldred | 213 |
Eldred II | 248 |
CONCLUSION | 257 |
Us Now | 276 |
Them Soon | 287 |
NOTES | 307 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 331 |
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Common terms and phrases
Aibo American archive argued argument available at link balance blog Brewster Kahle broadcast Causbys chapter claim commercial companies Congress Congress's power Constitution copy copyright holders copyright law copyright owner copyright term costs create Creative Commons creative property creators Disney doujinshi drugs effect Eldred enable example exclusive right fair file sharing film free culture free software freedom Future of Ideas harm idea important infringement innovation intellectual property Internet radio Jack Valenti Justice Kahle kids Lawrence Lessig lawyers license limited million movie MPAA Napster noncommercial patents percent permission piracy pirates produced property rights protect public domain publishers radio station recording industry regulation RIAA sense simply song Sonny Bono Statute of Anne Steamboat Willie story Supreme Court television there's tinker tion tradition users Valenti WIPO wrong
References to this book
New Literacies: Changing Knowledge in the Classroom Colin Lankshear,Michele Knobel No preview available - 2006 |