Culture Libre [[bib_285]]

Published by Penguin Books

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About the Book

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 First Congress in 1790 was 14 years, renewable once. 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.

Table of Contents

PREFACE
xiii
INTRODUCTION
1
“PIRACY”
15
  CHAPTER ONE: Creators
21
  CHAPTER TWO: “Mere Copyists”
31
  CHAPTER THREE: Catalogs
48
  CHAPTER FOUR: “Pirates”
53
    Film
53
    Recorded Music
55
    Radio
58
    Cable TV
59
  CHAPTER FIVE: “Piracy”
62
    Piracy I
63
    Piracy II
66
“PROPERTY”
81
  CHAPTER SIX: Founders
85
  CHAPTER SEVEN: Recorders
95
  CHAPTER EIGHT: Transformers
100
  CHAPTER NINE: Collectors
108
  CHAPTER TEN: “Property”
116
    Why Hollywood Is Right
124
    Beginnings
130
    Law: Duration
133
    Law: Scope
136
    Law and Architecture: Reach
139
    Architecture and Law: Force
147
    Market: Concentration
161
    Together
168
PUZZLES
175
  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Chimera
177
  CHAPTER TWELVE: Harms
183
    Constraining Creators
184
    Constraining Innovators
188
    Corrupting Citizens
199
BALANCES
209
  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Eldred
213
  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Eldred II
248
CONCLUSION
257
AFTERWORD
273
  Us, Now
276
    Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples
277
    Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea
282
  Them, Soon
287
    1. More Formalities
287
      Registration and Renewal
289
      Marking
290
    2. Shorter Terms
292
    3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use
294
    4. Liberate the Music—Again
296
    5. Fire Lots of Lawyers
304
NOTES
307
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
331
INDEX
333