The Book Free Culture
Foreword by Justice for the World (www.justicefortheworld.org) • European Human Rights Awareness Foundation
The book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig challenges each of us to take another look at our stance on copyright in this ever changing world where the Internet has made such a big impact to the point that newer generations know not otherwise and older generations are unwilling to admit that certain things just may stand differently from before.
- Video of Lawrence Lessig's final talk on Free Culture on January 31st 2008 at Stanford University.
Free Culture calls for the safe-keeping of a free society and warns lawmakers in the United States especially not to take things too far in protecting copyrights at the expense of creativity. Whether one should agree or disagree with the stances of Professor Lessig on this matter is of course debatable, and therefore the book Free Culture is extremely interesting to those of us interested in matters such as copyright and internet freedom. Free Culture has inspired growing interest and for people to take and call for a more neutral stance in the copyright debate, to which is generally referred to as the Free Culture Movement, which movement may well continue even though Lessig himself recently stopped focusing on the copyright debate.
Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and and founder of Creative Commons. When giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and The Future of Ideas on January 31st, 2008 he ended 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with presentations that inspired the Free Culture Movement. According to his blog, he is has now moved on from the copyright debate and is setting his sights on what it calls corruption in Washington. Though this is not an interest of ours per se, and though he made that statement before Barack Obama was instated as President, we will however watch closely to what Professor Lessig has to say going forward as we find his reputation highly respectable based on what he has said so far. We are very pleased to see that the White House is now also using a Creative Commons License in its copyright notice.
Justice for the World has decided to republish the book Free Culture in order to raise awareness about a different stance on copyrights than one might have without having read this book and one that may indeed take an unexpectedly large scope of issues into consideration, still without advocating piracy.
The following is this book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License. This publication, without or including this foreword, may be republished for non-commercial purposes so long it is attributed to both the author and, if also including this foreword, to Justice for the World.
FREE CULTURE
HOW BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY
BY LAWRENCE LESSIG
CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY JUSTICE FOR THE WORLD
As above but without video.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
“PIRACY”
CHAPTER ONE: Creators
CHAPTER TWO: “Mere Copyists”
CHAPTER THREE: Catalogs
CHAPTER FOUR: “Pirates”
Film
Recorded Music
Radio
Cable TV 5
CHAPTER FIVE: “Piracy”
Piracy I
Piracy II
“PROPERTY”
CHAPTER SIX: Founders
CHAPTER SEVEN: Recorders
CHAPTER EIGHT: Transformers
CHAPTER NINE: Collectors
CHAPTER TEN: “Property”
Why Hollywood Is Right
Beginnings
Law: Duration
Law: Scope
Law and Architecture: Reach
Architecture and Law: Force
Market: Concentration
Together
PUZZLES
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Chimera
CHAPTER TWELVE: Harms
Constraining Creators
Constraining Innovators
Corrupting Citizens
BALANCES
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Eldred
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Eldred II
CONCLUSION
AFTERWORD
Us, Now
Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed:
Examples
Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea
Them, Soon
1. More Formalities
Registration and Renewal
Marking
2. Shorter Terms
3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use
4. Liberate the Music—Again
5. Fire Lots of Lawyers
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
PREFACE
At the end of his review of my first book, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, David Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer-related texts, wrote this:
Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn’t affect people who aren’t online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don’t like the Internet’s system, you can always flip off the modem. 1
Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book—that software, or “code,” functioned as a kind of law—and his review suggested the happy thought that if life in cyberspace got bad, we could always “drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome”-like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the modem, unplug the computer, and any troubles that exist in that space wouldn’t “affect” us anymore. Pogue might have been right in 1999—I’m skeptical, but maybe.
But even if he was right then, the point is not right now: Free Culture is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected “people who aren’t online.” There is no switch that will insulate us from the Internet’s effect.
But unlike Code, the argument here is not much about the Internet itself. It is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important.
That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the Free Software Movement 2), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
If we understood this change, I believe we would resist it. Not “we” on the Left or “you” on the Right, but we who have no stake in the particular industries of culture that defined the twentieth century. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, if you are in this sense disinterested, then the story I tell here will trouble you. For the changes I describe affect values that both sides of our political culture deem fundamental.
We saw a glimpse of this bipartisan outrage in the early summer of 2003. As the FCC considered changes in media ownership rules that would relax limits on media concentration, an extraordinary coalition generated more than 700,000 letters to the FCC opposing the change. As William Safire described marching “uncomfortably alongside CodePink Women for Peace and the National Rifle Association, between liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative Ted Stevens,” he formulated perhaps most simply just what was at stake: the concentration of power.
And as he asked,
Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power—political, corporate, media, cultural—should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy. 3
This idea is an element of the argument of Free Culture, though my focus is not just on the concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership, but more importantly, if because less visibly, on the concentration of power produced by a radical change in the effective scope of the law. The law is changing; that change is altering the way our culture gets made; that change should worry you—whether or not you care about the Internet, and whether you’re on Safire’s left or on his right.
The inspiration for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes from the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I reread Stallman’s own work, especially the essays in Free Software, Free Society, I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago. One could thus well argue that this work is “merely” derivative.
I accept that criticism, if indeed it is a criticism. The work of a lawyer is always derivative, and I mean to do nothing more in this book than to remind a culture about a tradition that has always been its own. Like Stallman, I defend that tradition on the basis of values. Like Stallman, I believe those are the values of freedom. And like Stallman, I believe those are values of our past that will need to be defended in our future. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
Like Stallman’s arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.
Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
Continue reading Free Culture (Original Version).