Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
From the Website:
"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."
Why this is progressive/liberal: Walt Disney lived in an era where he could combine his entrepreneurial genius with creative works in the public domain to create a national treasure. As corporations have grown more powerful they have claimed more of the scarce resources that once were understood to belong to the public. Lessig makes an argument for resisting the tide of corporate ownership over culture that should belong to us all.
Buy the Kindle version: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Check out the free version available on the Web.
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