Saturday, June 26, 2004
Book Review: Free Culture
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
Free Culture is not the type of book I usually read. It all started when I first started blogging and discovered Boing Boing Blog and it's editor Cory Doctorow. Featured prominently at that time was Cory's first published novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I was intrigued by the title but that might be as far as it went if I didn't notice that he had posted the entire contents of his book online! Wow, I couldn’t believe it. This was the first I had heard of Creative Commons, an alternative to the normal (and highly restrictive) US copyright. It allowed others to do all kinds of interesting stuff with the text, like translate it and perform it, as long as they did not do so for profit. Of course Cory really wanted people to buy the book. I read the first couple of chapters and went out at bought it right away - it worked!
I became a regular Boing Boing reader and in March read this post about Lawrence Leesig's new book about Copyright, Free Culture. Lessig has also released his book under Creative Commons and a blogger had the idea of asking for volunteers to record themselves reading chapters of the book. He got plenty and I downloaded MP3's of the entire book from the Free Culture web site. I had wanted to try listing to a book on my iPod and this seemed like a good mix. Anyway, I think this whole idea is just cool and I hope it catches on. It's great viral marketing. Another example is Baen Books a few years ago printing the first book in the Honor Harrington series, On Basilisk Station, as a $1.99 paperback. I bought a bunch of those and gave them to friends who ended up buying all the rest of the books.
On to the book itself. The principal claim of the book is that there has been a fundamental change in power being brought to bare by copyright owners. From the steady lengthening of the term of copyright to the new laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, our culture is being robbed of a public domain to draw from and we will be the worse for it. This all stems as a reaction to a destabilizing technology, computers connected to the Internet. The books shows that this pattern of destabilizing technology has occurred many times in the past (player piano rolls, FM radio, cable television) and in every case the effected parties applied to the government for relief. In most cases, the government looked to the best interests of the whole of the country not just the lobbies of the powerful organizations holding copyrights. Unfortunately that is no longer the case as, concurrently with the development of the internet there has been in unprecedented consolidation of media into few powerful corporations that now seem to wield a huge amount of influence on the government. The book describes the current situation and how we got here and has several suggestions for courses of action for the future.
I learned a lot from the book and found it interesting throughout. The audio was certainly hit and miss. Fortunately and enjoyed most of the readers of the longer chapters. I enjoyed it enough that I wanted a paper copy so I bought it along Leesig's The Future of Ideas.
Free Culture is not the type of book I usually read. It all started when I first started blogging and discovered Boing Boing Blog and it's editor Cory Doctorow. Featured prominently at that time was Cory's first published novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I was intrigued by the title but that might be as far as it went if I didn't notice that he had posted the entire contents of his book online! Wow, I couldn’t believe it. This was the first I had heard of Creative Commons, an alternative to the normal (and highly restrictive) US copyright. It allowed others to do all kinds of interesting stuff with the text, like translate it and perform it, as long as they did not do so for profit. Of course Cory really wanted people to buy the book. I read the first couple of chapters and went out at bought it right away - it worked!
I became a regular Boing Boing reader and in March read this post about Lawrence Leesig's new book about Copyright, Free Culture. Lessig has also released his book under Creative Commons and a blogger had the idea of asking for volunteers to record themselves reading chapters of the book. He got plenty and I downloaded MP3's of the entire book from the Free Culture web site. I had wanted to try listing to a book on my iPod and this seemed like a good mix. Anyway, I think this whole idea is just cool and I hope it catches on. It's great viral marketing. Another example is Baen Books a few years ago printing the first book in the Honor Harrington series, On Basilisk Station, as a $1.99 paperback. I bought a bunch of those and gave them to friends who ended up buying all the rest of the books.
On to the book itself. The principal claim of the book is that there has been a fundamental change in power being brought to bare by copyright owners. From the steady lengthening of the term of copyright to the new laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, our culture is being robbed of a public domain to draw from and we will be the worse for it. This all stems as a reaction to a destabilizing technology, computers connected to the Internet. The books shows that this pattern of destabilizing technology has occurred many times in the past (player piano rolls, FM radio, cable television) and in every case the effected parties applied to the government for relief. In most cases, the government looked to the best interests of the whole of the country not just the lobbies of the powerful organizations holding copyrights. Unfortunately that is no longer the case as, concurrently with the development of the internet there has been in unprecedented consolidation of media into few powerful corporations that now seem to wield a huge amount of influence on the government. The book describes the current situation and how we got here and has several suggestions for courses of action for the future.
I learned a lot from the book and found it interesting throughout. The audio was certainly hit and miss. Fortunately and enjoyed most of the readers of the longer chapters. I enjoyed it enough that I wanted a paper copy so I bought it along Leesig's The Future of Ideas.
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