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| Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity | 
 enlarge | Author: Lawrence Lessig
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $3.44
You Save: $21.51 (86%)
Buy New/Used from $3.44
Avg. Customer Rating:  (35 reviews)
Sales Rank: 50358
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594200068
Dewey Decimal Number: 343.73099
EAN: 9781594200069
ASIN: 1594200068
Publication Date: March 30, 2004
Release Date: March 25, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...
 essential for 21st century September 30, 2008
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 August 3, 2008
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 believe. Nor is it a conflict between those who support individual property rights and aspiring property abolitioners. If anything, such strawmen have been set up for no other purpose than to vilify moderates on the copyright debate and frame discourse on a divisive ideological basis.
Contrary to media perceptions, those attempting to subvert the status quo have been the intellectual property extremists who favor limitless copyright terms, instead of the careful balance between incentives for creative work (through the state-enforced copyrights), and infusion of creative work into the public domain after a reasonable time frame.
That balance has been the rationale behind modern copyright law, and not the misguided notion that a corporation may hold perpetual ownership of the ideas conceived by its employees - "for ever minus one day", per Jack Valenti's infamous quip. This latter restrictive, extremist approach to copyright, Lessig argues, would hamper the fertilization of public domain with new ideas, stifle innovation and go to the face of copyright law's goals.
"Free Culture" provides numerous examples of how the eventual flow of copyrighted works into the public domain buttresses innovation and creativity ; how the staunchest sponsors of limitless copyright extensions have they themselves tapped into the public domain for some of their most cherished values, and how creativity, just as much as artistic and individual liberties are compromised by the tidal wave of copyright extremism.
In light of the encroachment upon consumer rights, creative freedom and the public domain by such restrictive measures as anti-circumvention laws and retroactive copyright extensions, Lawrence Lessig's book is an eloquent, indispensable call for some long-needed moderation in copyright policy.
 Free Mickey April 7, 2008
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. Freeing Mickey is really the least of it but nevertheless lies at the center of the issue and makes a great symbol. However I caution the potential reader to not multitask and read this book while viewing The Pirates of The Caribbean as the outcome is that they will go on to raise the colors and break the law!
A must-read for anyone interested or concerned about copyrights October 24, 2007
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 and art.
Fascinating October 9, 2007
This book is worth the price just to hear the constant process of American culture - be a pirate, fend off "the man" to build your industry, become "the man," then go after the pirates who are presumably cutting into your business. Money makes hypocrites of us all. Please, RIAA, don't sue me for reading this book (although I'm sure you'll find a way, if there aren't any grandmothers or poor college students you can harass).
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