general

A free culture supports and protects creators. The internet has established the ability for thousands to participate in the building and cultivation of culture. Laws regulating intellectual property have been laws against piracy. Copyright law regulates both republishing and transforming the work of another.

Disney's great creativity was built on the work of others. In 1928 the average term of copyright was thirty years. Today public domain is presumptive only for work created before the Great Depression. In the world free culture has been broadly exploited. Japan has a huge market of knock off comics and does not have many lawyers.

We celebrate property but there is plenty of value not subject to the strictures of property law. George Eastman created roll film and the upshot was the era of mass photography. The real significance was not economic but social. Now the internet allows creations to be shared, web logs, blogs, have grown dramatically. Blogs are a virtual public meeting. They are unchoreographed public discourse. Bloggers are amateur journalists.

John Seely Brown of Xerox believes we learn by tinkering. Recording music, radio, cable TV all were technologies involving forms of piracy. The piracy problems were solved by legislation. Peer to peer sharing was made famous by Napster. It is not clear that the file sharing has caused the decline in the sale of CDs.

In 1710 the British parliament adopted the first copyright act. In the last three hundred years the concept of copyright has been applied ever more broadly. The copyright law was a limitation on the power of book sellers. A decision in 1774 in the House of Lords held the limitation in the Copyright Act set forth the notion of a Public Domain. The common laws right of a publisher's monopoly was broken.

A documentary film maker could not rely on the fair use doctrine in showing a short glimpse of THE SIMPSONS in an employee break room. The author claims that Jack Valenti analyzes intellectual property improperly. In 1790 Congress enacted the first copyright law. In 1976 the law changed the scheme and for all works created after 1978 there was only one copyright term, the author's life plus fifty years. For corporations the term was seventy-five years. An amendment to the law extended the term for an individual to ninety five years. Copyright protects derivative uses also.

Technology researchers have been warned they may be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Technologies of the internet are open to snoops as well as sharers. The change in concentration and integration of the media is cause for concern. There should be an evaluation of the loss of independence. The author cautions that in the case of internet technology a land grab is taking place. Currently there is a widely punitive system tending to stifle creativity. The author believes that a reasonable balance between opposing interests in the area of intellectual property has been lost.

Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" is nothing short of brilliant. It outlines an incredibly important modern problem that is lost under the noise of more pressing concerns like the war in Iraq or corporate scandals. That problem is the loss of our culture at the hands of intellectual property law. And what that problem lacks in immediacy and prime-time-worthy sex appeal, it makes up in long-term consequences.

Lessig does a formidable job of making the issue come alive for both experts and laymen with his use of anecdotes that clearly illustrate how the ever-growing term and scope of copyright have stifled creativity and shrunken the portion of our culture in the public domain. He shows how the content industry is trying to redefine IP as the equivalent of tangible property, when it is not and has never been, and how that industry has manipulated Congress and the Courts to get closer to its goal.

If you followed the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (like I did; I was lucky to be at oral argument before the Supremes), you'll want to pick up this book for Lessig's inside account. Most of it is a mea culpa for not realizing that the Court didn't want a constitutional argument, but a consequentialist one. I'm not sure this would have made a difference. The Court's right, who, like Lessig, I thought would chime in for a strict reading of what is clear language of "limited times" in the Copyright Clause, must have had some special reason for turning their backs on their originalist rhetoric and I doubt that a political argument would have changed their minds. I still can't understand what that reason might be, and I refuse to believe it's just the dead hand of stare decisis that gave Scalia pause. Lessig is obviously very upset at that Justice; while he does mention having clerked for Judge Posner, Lessig doesn't mention in his bio (neither in the dust jacket nor the back pages of the book) that he clerked for Scalia in 1990-91.

One curious thing about the book is that throughout it Lessig implies that he is a leftist and that the ideas he is advocating are leftist. He patronizingly writes at a couple of points that he would be surprised if a person on the right had read that far. I think he is selling himself-and conservative readers-short. In fact, there is very little in the book incompatible with a conservative or libertarian free-market viewpoint. Private interests using the power of the state to distort the market and quash their competitors, and an originalist Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution as the response are very conservative themes indeed.

But it's not all agreement. I, like most free marketeers, will object to parts of Free Culture. Foremost among them are Lessig's concerns about media concentration. The fact is that there are more options today in television and radio than 20 years ago, and the the explosion of Internet sites and blogs, which Lessig spends most of the book lauding, belies the idea that news can be controlled. And it is interesting that Lessig seems to understand this. He says that he has seen concentration only as market efficiency in action, and that only recently has he 'begun to change his mind'. His skepticism is reflected in the fact that he only dedicated a small section (7 pages) to the issue. Another point of contention will be some of the solutions he proposes. While I applaud the idea of shorter terms that must be renewed with payment of a token fee, compulsory licensing and fees paid out by the government out of general revenues is beyond the pail. Won't such mechanisms be ripe for corporate manipulation as well?

Still, small quibbles aside, this book beautifully puts the IP issue in perspective. Everyone is touched by copyright whether they know it or not. This book shows us how the future of our culture is a dark one unless we change course soon.

If you care that your rights as creators and comsumers of art are being taken away by multinational corporations this is the book to read