Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
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Author: Lawrence LessigEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2004-03-30
ISBN: 1594200068
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Book Reviews of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Book Review: Free Mickey
Summary: 4 Stars
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!
Summary of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
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.
"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?
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