Download this: Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig
While new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups.
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stamford Law School. He’s also what you might call a cultural environmentalist. Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
His new book is called ‘Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity‘ – and with a surprising amount of leeway from his publisher, Penguin, he’s made it available online with a Creative Commons licence.
In other words, you can download the pdf of the entire book, as long as you credit the author appropriately, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Seems fair.
Most fascinating of all, at least for this reader, is the first and most alarming case study that sets the scene for the whole book. It’s the story of the suppression by the radio industry in the 1930s of FM technology.
FM’s inventor, Edwin Howard Armstrong astounded RCA execs at a demonstration of the technology – but when they discovered that it was a completely new format that competed with AM, rather than simply a filter to clean up the AM signal, they were furious.
And so they responded – much the same way that big media responds to new media today: with lawsuits, obstructionism and lies. Of course, as is so often the case with these sorts of things, it ended badly:
“Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth story window to his death.” – from ‘Free Culture’ – Lawrence Lessig.
It’s fascinating stuff – and the parallels are all too apparent in today’s media environment.
Lessig not only offers a critique, but also glimpses of a solution. He’s heavily involved in the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) which boasts the membership of people that I hold in incredibly high regard (Cory Doctorow is a bit of a flawed personal hero). It also contains a couple of people I’d charitably describe as well-meaning but over-zealous (though other people might use the word ‘flakes’).
As far as the book goes, I’ve only read it quickly through once – but I think it’s a book I’d like to own, so I’ll be buying a copy. Funny how that works, really isn’t it?
