From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the book; for other
meanings of the phrase, see
free culture.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the
Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) (published in paperback as
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of
Creativity) 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.
"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)
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 suggesting 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.
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, partly
because they were allowed to. Users who commented volunteered to
narrate certain chapters. Two days later, most of the book had been
narrated.
Besides audio production, this book was also translated into Chinese, a
project proposed by Isaac
Mao and completed as a collaboration involving many bloggers
from mainland China and Taiwan. Other translations include Catalan,
Czech [2], French,
Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese [3] and
Spanish.
Editions
- US 1st hardcover edition: ISBN 1-59420-006-8
- US 1st paperback edition: ISBN 0-14-303465-0
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links
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