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A new study on the social dimension of creativity examines the destruction of the larger public domain of ideas, assessing the creative and innovative repercussions of America's long terms of copyright, as well as the impact of new technologies, big media, and cultural monopolies on our freedom to create, construct, and imagine. 35,000 first printing. From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically theInternet, 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. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine. preface INTRODUCTION “PIRACY” CHAPTER ONE:Creators CHAPTER TWO:“Mere Copyists” CHAPTER THREE:Catalogs CHAPTER FOUR:“Pirates” Film Recorded Music Radio Cable TV 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 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 "Lawrence Lessig, the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and cant do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine."--Book cover At the endof 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. Lessig details the history of copyright law as it pertains to digital media, how it has affected creativity and expression online. Title for the hardcover and PDF versions: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity