Free Culture

I just spent all day in the car, so I took this as a chance to listen to the free audiobook of Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture.

It's well worth reading/listening to. You can download the book for free here. Chapter 10 is particularly important. On the one hand, it's probably the most dry, technical chapter in the book, but it's fascinating because it basically explains why there has been such a revolutionary change in copyright as a result of the development of the internet.

But at the same time, the rest of the book shows that all is not changing: copyright has always been a battleground between content owners, producers and distributors attempting to protect their creations and profits derived from them and advocates of the public good and the necessity of open information to creativity and progress. The history of every creative industry is one of piracy and transformation of other works to new uses, and with the invention of each new technology, those who benefit from the status quo fight against the new technology's threat to their property rights. So, in this sense, the fights over new technology we're seeing now are nothing new at all. What makes things so different now, however, is that the nature of the technology allows for a degree of control and regulation by the copyright holders unimaginable to previous generations of copyright holders.

Anyway, it's worth a read, or maybe next time you're going on a road trip, download the mp3s.