free culture, by lawrence lessig
Free Culture, how big media uses technology and law to lock down culture and control creativity.
by Lawrence Lessig.
i guess hundreds of reviews have been written about this book, most of them by people who are more qualified to do so than i am, so i am not going to write another one. i’d just like to point out the key points this book gave me:
culture is the sum of all creative work done by the people of a community, be it a country, a continent or the entire world. creative work is (almost?) always based on the work of others, creative people take pieces of the work of others and transform them into something new by combining, changing and adding to them.
in our (the book talks mainly about the US) society, the author of a creative work has the exclusive rights to that work. if someone else wants to use it, she has to ask for permission. this is good, because it enables creative people to be rewarded for their work. these exclusive rights are (at least in theory) limited to a certain period of time. after that, the work goes into the [ublic domain where it is free for everyone to use, i.e. to build upon it.
the first copyright law was introduced in england in the 18th century. at this time, the english book market was controlled by a monopoly of publishers. they had the exculsive rights for publishing books, and as a result the prices were kept high and knowledge was only affordable by the rich. the copyright was actually introduced to limit these exculsive right - to a period of 14 years. this is an important point, the copyright law was introduced to limit the rights of the publishers, not to give them more rights. they already had these exclusive rights according to the so called common law. the english copyright law was later adopted by the united states.
the world changes. when the world changes, laws have to change, too. when laws are changed, common sense should be the basis. laws should serve the people in a country, it should not just serve a minority (exceptions apply), say, big media corporations.
in terms of the copyright law, this all worked pretty well for quite a long time, but it doesn’t anymore.
today’s (US) copyright laws mainly serve the purposes of a minority - guess who: big media companies. since the 1960s, the copyright time period has been quadrupled by congress. now the copyright term for any work created after ~1929 is about 95 years. the effect of this is that no creative piece of work has gone into the public domain for the last 95 years. the entire creative property of the united states belongs to a handful of media companies. if someone wants to create any work based on something created in the last 95 years, he most probably has to ask one of these big companies for permission.
there is an example in the book where some one has created a documentary film, in one scene you can see a TV in the background showing an episode of the simpsons for ~4 seconds. under american law, you are allowed to take these 4 seconds and not pay anyone for it - this is known as fair use. just to be sure this person did ask the creator of the simpsons, matt groenig, for permission. matt did not have any problem with the documentary, but to be sure he would ask his publisher. to make a long story short, the company who owned the rights wanted $10.000 for 4s of the simpsons running on a TV in the background of an independent documentary. the movie was digitally edited and the simpsons were removed. this is just one of the examples in the book, but it shows one thing: these media companies don’t give a damn about the creation of culture and creative work. by making it imposiible to build on their creative property, these companies effectively control the creation of anything. they are the culture of the US.
(more to come)
the good news is that this book is free - free to download, read, copy, change, redistribute. as a result there are several audio versions of this book available. more at free-culture.cc.
Tags: