Free Culture

In 2004, Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig published the book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, an in depth examination of how the American legal system is ruining our culture of creativity.

“For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history – between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission – has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.” (p. 8)

Lessig explains how Copyright Law used to offer protection to the creator for less time, so that the works would eventually enter the public domain. According to Lessig, this is how many Disney cartoon films were created (e.g. - Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, etc); the stories were written by other people, but were no longer protected by a creator or publisher.

“Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system then creators do today.” (p.9)

Decreasing the power of Copyright holders, Lessig argues, won't necessarily lead to anarchy or the devaluation of property. It simply means that huge corporations would have less influence over people's ability to create.

“Rather than understanding the changes the Internet might permit, and rather than taking time to let ‘common sense’ resolve how best to respond, we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law – and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been. We allow this, I believe, not because it is right, and not because most of us really believe in these changes. We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law.” (p. 13)

(Source: Free Culture and http://lessig.org)

Lawrence Lessig is leading the transformation of how people think about Intellectual Property and the Internet. (photo courtesy of http://lessig.org)

The cover of the book. (photo courtesy of Lawrence Lessig, under a Creative Commons license)