One of my Media & Society course's textbook chapters is an excerpt from Stanford Univeristy law professor Lawrence Lessig's 2001 book, The Future of Ideas...
For students who have (or haven't) read the chapter and want to move ahead to see some of his ideas at work, these paragraphs describe one of the Lessig's central issues:
"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 First Congress in 1790 was 14 years,
renewable once. 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 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.
What's at stake is our freedom -- freedom to create, freedom
to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine."
No trees died to "print" that paragraph. It's from the "about" page of a site dedicated to Lessig's third book, Free Culture, which is, as you might expect, available in traditional paperback and hard-cover editions. However, an electronic text of the book is downloadable -- and under a Creative Commons copyright that permits "derivative" works. As a result, you can download not only a text copy of the book, but "remixes" including audio readings of the book, text translations in seven languages, versions formated for Palm handhelds, PostScript and PDF... and more.
The site also includes one of Lessig's presentations of the subject matter as an 8.4 MB Flash movie -- his audio narration of an original 243-slide presentation ("on the current state of intellectual
property and its ramifications on creativity and culture") from the OSCON 2002 conference.
If he's raised your interest and you're curious what has happened in the past five years, you may want to follow Lessig's more recent writings, either in print or on his blog. The most timely topic this month is whether recordings of presidential debates should be, as Lessig says,
"free of the insanely complex regulation of speech we call copyright law." Who's arguing the other side? See his blog.
9:15:18 PM 
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