Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
22nd February 2006 by Sean
| Author: Lawrence Lessig |  |
Ok, this is two “non-business” books in a row. I apologize to those in need of the newest airport best-seller, we’ll be getting right on it next week. This one is good though. Free Culture is all about how the American tradition of mixing and remixing culture and ideas, building on those around us and that came before us, is being quashed by dramatic changes in the scope and intent of content protection, especially copyright.
Understanding the ideas regarding the nature of creativity in this book is sure to help any entrepreneur, especially any Internet entrepreneur. There is even a section on how the ideas in the book affect entrepreneurial innovation (called Constraining Innovators). The author is a Stanford Law professor that specializes in cyber-law and has amazing insight into how law affects the way society is shaped. You can get the book from Amazon or you can get a free E-book from Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture Web site.
What Amazon says
Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
What Michael Skapinker from the Financial Times says.
There is much to Prof Lessig’s arguments, but I think he is overly pessimistic. I see the music industry’s behaviour as desperate. There are too many people downloading free music to stop it. In a New York Times interview in 2002, David Bowie said: ‘The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years . . . I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist.