Compliance Toolkit

Free Culture review

9.0

Editors' Rating

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Oct 2004

Lawrence Lessig first came to public prominence when he was briefly appointed as special master in one of Microsoft's anti-trust trials. Since then, he has established himself as one of the more important commentators on intellectual property rights and wrongs. He is founder of Creative Commons, an effort to give people a standard, easily customisable licence they can attach to content to allow, rather than restrict, further uses. Free Culture is his third book, and while it hasn't been officially published in the UK, it is available from online bookshops. It is also available as a freely downloadable PDF.

Free is the operative word: not free as in price, but free as in freely reusable. The central point of Free Culture, whose subtitle is 'How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity', is the importance of the public domain. Although today's corporations want to lock up all their material, much of it was built on prior work that was available to them because it was not subject to those restrictions. Concentrating primarily on American law, Free Culture documents the way copyright laws have been progressively tightened over the last couple of decades.

In 1975, a work had to be registered to be copyrighted, and the term was 28 years, renewable once. Often, renewals did not take place. Now, copyright is automatic, and the term is author's life plus 70 years -- or 120 years in the case of corporations. These are, of course, American laws, but there is increasingly little difference between the US and Europe on these points and there is much shared history. Copyright law, Lessig argues citing a mass of historical detail, was originally designed to limit the power of publishers who, in 17th century England, were immensely powerful.

The length of ownership and the tight control over what consumers may do with the content are what exercises Lessig. The price is high, since new intellectual development always depends on access to ideas that have gone before. Although this book is far more focused on the entertainment industry than on the open-source software movement, the same principles apply, and in fact Lessig cites free software guru Richard Stallman as one of his most important inspirations.

Lessig closes with an argument that lawyers should not be content simply to profit from these laws. Instead, they should be working to change them. In addition, he believes that the file-sharing about which the entertainment industry is so exercised won't be an issue in ten years' time, when technology will have evolved to higher speeds, pervasive connectivity, and better access to content. We should be thinking ahead, and any systems we put in place to compensate creators under today's conditions should be merely transitory.

Lessig's best and most internationally applicable book is still his first, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Free Culture, however, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand today's copyright wars and their background.