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Lawrence Lessig, "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), is often called our leading cultural environmentalist. His focus is the ecosystem of creativity, the environment created around it by technology and law. To read Free Culture is to understand that the health of that ecosystem is in grave peril. While new technologies always lead to new laws, Lessig shows that never before have the big cultural monopolists drummed up such unease about these advances, especially the Internet, to shrink the public domain while using the same advances to control what we can and can't do with the culture all around us. What's at stake is our freedom -- freedom to create, freedom to build, and, ultimately, freedom to imagine.… (more)
User reviews
Towards the end he states that he lost a major case because he tried to argue to hard for legal and rational points and suppressing some of the passion of his work, but he seems to be making the same mistake again.
Not a bad book, but certainly could have either been compressed and a bit more academic or...shorter and more passionate. There's later books by other authors that argue some of the same points but better. I'd recommend Common As Air by Hyde for more of a general audience interested in the history of copyright and this book for more of a serious buff on copyright issues.
I do wish I knew of a book that examined the tragedy of the orphan works. Lessig makes a good rational argument for the vastness of knowledge affected by it, but it would be nice to see a book that focused on it.