Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lawrence Lessig
Exchange rates (USD)
| EUR | 0.731 |
| USD | 1.000 |
| GBP | 0.641 |
| CAD | 1.071 |
| JPY | 89.265 |
Updated 2010-02-08
Release: 2004-03-30
Penguin Press HC, The
Pages: 368 (Hardcover)
Price evolution (USD):
| Site | Original | USD | *Shipping | **Total | |
| amazon.co.uk | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock |
| amazon.fr | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock |
| amazon.de | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock |
| amazon.co.jp | failed | failed | failed | failed | failed |
| amazon.com | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock |
| amazon.ca | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock | no stock |
Description:
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 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.
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 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.
Other Formats:
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Penguin (Non-Classics) - 2005-02-22
368 pages (Paperback)
Penguin (Non-Classics) - 2005-02-22
368 pages (Paperback)
Similar Products:
Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox
Stanford Law School - 2003-06
256 pages (Paperback)
Stanford Law School - 2003-06
256 pages (Paperback)
Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity
NYU Press - 2003-04-01
256 pages (Paperback)
NYU Press - 2003-04-01
256 pages (Paperback)
Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Indiana Series in Philosophy of Technology)
Indiana University Press - 1990-06
240 pages (Paperback)
Indiana University Press - 1990-06
240 pages (Paperback)
The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries
Oxford University Press, USA - 2003-12-04
512 pages (Hardcover)
Oxford University Press, USA - 2003-12-04
512 pages (Hardcover)
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
Vintage - 2002-10-22
384 pages (Paperback)
Vintage - 2002-10-22
384 pages (Paperback)