Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

Rating:
Summary: How free are we????
Review: This is another great book by Lawrence Lessig.. The book starts off discussing Piracy and why people download music. There are four categories: The first is the person who downloads music instead of purchasing a CD. The next type of 'pirate' is the person who samples a song and if they like the artist goes and purchases the CD (sounds a lot like a radio station). The third type of person is the person who is looking for music that is no longer available commercially (this is unpopular music). Finally the last person is looking for music that is no longer under copyright law or that the owner wants to give away. Only one of these users is really considered piracy (that is the first one). The book also goes into the history of all the multimedia companies and how they all started out using some form of piracy some more than others. The rest of the book focuses on Copyright law and how the media companies have lobbied to get congress to EXTEND copyrights for 75 years. This means that any thing (music, books, movies and TV) created since 1930 is protected under copyright law. That mean that none of those works can be used to create new works without paying. Another way to look at this is that we only have access to the popular works since the 1930. What I mean is most production companies are only going to produce or print works which they think are popular and if they don't think it's going to bring them money then they don't publish it and we can't have access to it because no one is going to pay the creator a fee if they aren't going to make money off of it. For example all of Disney's movies are based on stories that were written and have gone into the public domain. The problem with this law is that all of these works will not be in the public domain for quite some time. Another change that Congress made is that you no longer have to register for a copyright so all work is copyrighted. This causes a problem because at least the registration required a copy of the original work. Now we no longer require that so it makes it harder to release work to the public domain even when the 75 years expires. Another issue is after the 75 years will companies like the RIAA, MPAA and Disney lobby to have another extension and if this happens again will congress be able to have this power to continue to extend these limits and as a result hurting the public and possible hindering the continuing development of society. I would like to have a choice as to what I read and what I watch and listen to and with the media companies holding copyrights they are deciding what we read and what we listen to and what we watch. So what are some of the things we can do change this. Some authors are giving away their works on the internet and other things like open source software (which is also in a battle with Microsoft) and other things that people are making available to everyone. Another example that I like is http://www.Bookcrossing.com, which allows you to register your books and then set them free. Set them free by leaving them somewhere with a book mark which references a number and then who ever wants to finds the book and read it and then passes it on again. Well in closing this is a great book and a lot of good examples and good recommendations.