Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

Front Cover
Penguin, Feb 22, 2005 - Social Science - 368 pages
Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
 

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
Creators
21
Mere Copyists
31
Catalogs
48
Piracy
62
Founders
85
Recorders
95
Collectors
108
Concentration
161
Together
168
Chimera
177
Harms
183
Eldred
213
Eldred II
248
CONCLUSION
257
Us Now
276

Property
116
Why Hollywood Is Right
124
Beginnings
130
Scope
136
Force
147
Them Soon
287
Free Use Vs Fair Use
294
Fire Lots of Lawyers
304
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
331
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. The author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, he is the chair of the Creative Commons project. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School, he has clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bibliographic information