Notes on Lawrence Lessig Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Key concepts: copyright, FOSS, learn by tinkering, pirates.
Teaches about copyright, public domain, in American and British history, when most media was printed, then traces evolution of legal theory, legislation, and judicial decisions through development of film, recorded music, radio, cable TV, and finally digital media, articulating length, scope, and reach of laws. While no one ever died from copyright circumvention, anti-circumvention is now built into many technologies, choking free use for artistic innovation and even culture studies. Puzzles today because so many Americans are technically criminals for downloading music and copying software and other materials. Implicit value judgment is that creative works beyond the bounds of the permission culture are better (more vibrant and efficient). Feeds into my free, open source as ethic arguments.
Related theorists: John Seely Brown, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Kahle, Stallman.
PREFACE
(xiv) The
opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture” - a culture
in which creators get to create only with the permission of the
powerful, or of creators from the past.
Was Stallman cognizant of the shift from unregulated works to burdening fair use as the justification of creative activity based on copies or derivatives of the intellectual property of the permission culture?
(xv) all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago.
INTRODUCTION
(3) it is
the special genius of a common law system, as ours is, that the law
adjusts to the technologies of the time.
Capture of governmental agencies by powerful interests threatened by legal or technical change, perhaps as a positive version of Foucault deliquencies.
(6) From the beginning, government
and government agencies have been subject to capture.
They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened
by either a legal or technical change.
(7) this book is about an
effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself; an effect upon how
culture is made.
(7) We can glimpse a sense of this change by
distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial culture, and by
mapping the law's regulation of each. By “commercial culture” I
mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold or produced
to be sold. By “noncommercial culture” I mean all the rest.
(8)
For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which
individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the
regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control
a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before.
The technology that preserved the balance of our history - between
uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were
only upon permission - has been undone. The consequence is that we
are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission
culture.
(9) Corporations threatened by the potential of the
Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture
are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to
protect them.
Implicit value judgment is that creative works beyond the bounds of the permission culture are better (more vibrant and efficient).
(9) These modern-day equivalents of the early twentieth-century radio
or nineteenth-century railroads are using their power to get the law
to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant
technology for building culture.
(10) The “war” that has been
waged against the technologies of the Internet - what Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his
“own terrorist war” - has been framed as a battle about the rule
of law and respect for property.
(11) Yet the law's response to
the Internet, when tied to changes in the technology of the Internet
itself, has massively increased the effective regulation of
creativity in America. To build upon or critique the culture around
us one must ask, Oliver Twist-like, for permission first.
(12)
There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture”
was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time
when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture
has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.
(13) The
struggle that rages just now centers on two ideas: “piracy” and
“property.”
(13) We allow it because the interests most
threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly
compromised process of making law.
“PIRACY”
(17)
Using distributed intelligence, p2p systems facilitate the easy
spread of content in a way unimagined a generation ago.
Drefyuss if value, then right theory of creative property founds notion of digital piracy.
(18)
It is what NYU law professor Rochelle
Dreyfuss
criticizes
as the “if value, then right” theory of creative property - if
there is value, then someone must have a right to that value.
(19)
Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an
instrument.
(19) The source of this confusion is a distinction
that the law no longer takes care to draw - the distinction between
republishing someone's work on the one hand and building upon or
transforming that work on the other.
(19) the law's role is less
and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain
industries against competition.
CHAPTER ONE: Creators
(23)
Disney added to the work of others before him, creating something new
out of something just barely old.
Copyright term used to last only a generation and a half.
(24-25) For most of our history,
the public domain was just over the horizon. From 1790 until 1978,
the average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years,
meaning that most culture just a generation and a half old was free
for anyone to build upon without the permission of anyone else.
Today's equivalent would be for the creative work from the 1960s and
1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build upon without
permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for
content from before the Great Depression.
(25-26) It is not
doujinshi if it is just
a copy; the artist must make a
contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly
or significantly.
(27) regulation by law is a function of both the
words on the books and the costs of making those words have effect.
CHAPTER TWO: “Mere Copyists”
(33)
Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional,
required permission before he could capture and print whatever image
he wanted. Their answer was no.
(35) But though we could imagine
this system of permission, it would be very hard to see how
photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for
permission had been built into the rules that govern it.
(36) few
of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or
leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense.
Twentieth-century media is read only, passive, couch potato consumer; twenty-first century can write.
(37) “Read-only.” Passive recipients of culture produced
elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from
the twentieth century.
(37) The twenty-first century could be
different. This is the critical point. It could be both read and
write.
(39) Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most
powerful part - of constructing meaning.
(41) But unlike any
technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these
creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people,
practically instantaneously.
(41) The best of the blog entries are
relatively short; they point directly to words used by others,
criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most
important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.
(43)
But beyond architecture, blogs have solved the problem of norms.
(43)
One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in
the mainstream media.
(44) Blog space gives amateurs a way to
enter the debate - “amateur” not in the sense of inexperienced,
but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to
give their reports.
(45) As more and more citizens express what
they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people
understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in
your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be
criticized by others.
For the uses and advantages of FOSS for life, a maneuver within the dominant, repressive legal and technical codes of the permission culture.
Same Brown from Social Life of Information believes we learn by tinkering.
(45)
As [John Seely] Brown
believes,
we learn
by tinkering.
When “a lot of use grew up,” he explains, that tinkering was done
“on motorcycle engines, lawnmower engines, automobiles, radios, and
so on.” But digital technologies enable a different kind of
tinkering - with abstract ideas through in concrete form.
(46) The
best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free
software or open-source software (FS/OSS).
(47) The law and,
increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology,
and curiously, would otherwise ensure.
CHAPTER
THREE: Catalogs
(51)
For cases of “willful infringement,” the Copyright Act specifies
something lawyers call “statutory damages.” These damages permit
a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement.
CHAPTER FOUR: “Pirates”
History of content industry is piracy by if value, then right philosophy.
(53) If “piracy” means using the creative property of others without their permission - if “if value, then right” is true - then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy.
Film
(54) California was
remote enough from Edison's reach that filmmakers could pirate his
inventions without fear of the law. And the leaders of Hollywood
filmmaking, Fox most prominently, did just that.
Recorded Music
(57) A
statutory license is a license whose key terms are set by law. After
Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in 1909, record companies
were free to distribute copies of recordings so long as they paid the
composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute.
(57)
the law subsidizes
the recording industry through a
kind of piracy - by giving recording artists a weaker right than it
otherwise gives creative authors.
Radio
(59) Under the law
governing radio performances, the radio station does not have to pay
the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the composer.
Cable TV
(61) It took
Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of
whether cable companies had to pay for the content they
“pirated.”
(61) If “piracy” means using value from someone
else's creative property without permission from the creator - as it
is increasingly described today - then every
industry affected by copyright
today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy.
Film, records, radio, cable TV. . . .The list is long and could well
be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.
Every generation - until now.
CHAPTER FIVE: “Piracy”
(63-64)
We may have been born a pirate nation, but we will not allow any
other nation to have a similar childhood.
(65) If we have a
property system, and that system is properly balanced to the
technology of a time, then it is wrong to take property without the
permission of a property owner. That is exactly what “property”
means.
(66) Many kinds of “piracy” are useful and productive,
to produce either new content or new ways of doing business.
Piracy II
Types of use of sharing networks that border piracy defined as robbing author of profit; are they really harmful?
(66) The key to the “piracy”
that the law aims to quash is a use the “rob[s] the author of [his]
profit.”
(68-69) A. There are some who use sharing networks as
substitutes for purchasing content.
B. There are some who use
sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it.
C. There
are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted
contented that is no longer sold or that they would not have
purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high.
D.
there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that
is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give
away.
(70) The question is also how
harmful type A sharing is, and how
beneficial the other types of sharing are.
(72) Type C sharing,
then, is very much like used book stores or used record stores.
(73)
If efforts to solve the problem of type A sharing destroy the
opportunity for type D sharing, then we lose something important in
order to protect type A content.
(73) While the recording industry
understandably says, “This is how much we've lost,” we must also
ask, “How much has society gained from p2p sharing? What are the
efficiencies? What is the conent that otherwise would be
unavailable?”
(74) If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this
is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright
infringement.
(78) In our tradition, as the Supreme Court has
stated, copyright “has never accorded the copyright owner complete
control over all possible uses of his work.” Instead, the
particular uses that the law regulates have been defined by balancing
the good that comes from granting an exclusive right against the
burden such an exclusive right creates. And this balancing has
historically been done after
a technology has matured, or
settled into the mix of technologies that facilitate the distribution
of content.
“PROPERTY”
CHAPTER
SIX: Founders
(86)
We call the words from legislatures “positive law.” We call the
words from judges “common law.”
(87) The [1774] Statute of
Anne granted the author or “proprietor” of a book an exclusive
right to print that book. In an important limitation, however, and to
the horror of the booksellers, the law gave the bookseller that right
for a limited term.
Copyright originally forbade others from reprinting a book; today a larger set of restrictions on freedom of others.
(87-88)
The copyright
was
born as a very specific set of restrictions: It forbade others from
reprinting a book. In 1710, the “copy-right” was a right to use a
particular machine to replicate a particular work. . . . It did not
control any more generally how a work could be used.
Today the right includes a large collection of restrictions on the
freedom of others: It grants the author the exclusive right to copy,
the exclusive right to distribute, the exclusive right to perform,
and so on.
(88) Thus the “copy-right,” when viewed as a
monopoly right, was naturally viewed as a right that should be
limited.
(89) Many believed the power the booksellers exercised
over the spread of knowledge was harming that spread, just at the
time the Enlightenment was teaching the importance of education and
knowledge spread generally. The idea that knowledge should be free
was a hallmark of the time, and these powerful commercial interests
were interfering with that idea.
(89) The limitation on terms was
an indirect way to assure competition among publishers, and thus the
construction and spread of culture.
(90) The bookseller didn't
care squat for the rights of the author. His concern was the monopoly
profit that the author's work gave.
(93) Before the case of
Donaldson
v. Beckett,
there was no clear idea of a public domain in England. Before 1774,
there was a strong argument that common law copyrights were
perpetual. After 1774, the public domain was born. For the first time
in Anglo-American history, the legal control over creative works
expired, and the greatest works in English history - including those
of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Johnson, and Bunyan - were free of
legal restraint.
(94) The decision of the House of Lords meant
that the booksellers could no longer control how culture in England
would grow and develop. Culture in England was thereafter free.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Recorders
(99)
The law was born as a shield to protect publishers' profits against
the unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that
interferes with any use, transformative or not.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Transformers
(104)
how much creativity is never made just because the costs of clearing
the rights are so high?
(107) Much of “sampling” should be
considered “fair use.” But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine
to create. .. You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights
or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely
upon fair use rights.
CHAPTER NINE: Collectors
Before Internet Archive, no guarantee we can go back to see previous media.
(109) We take it for granted that we can go back to see what we
remember reading.
(109) Until the Internet Archive, there was no
way to go back.
(110) The Way Back Machine is the largest archive
of human knowledge in human history. . . . Television, it turns out,
is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of
twentieth-century culture was constructed through television, only a
tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see
today.
(111) How is it that we've created a world where
researchers trying to understand the effect of media on
nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers
trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century
America?
(112) The law doesn't require these copies to be kept by
anyone, or to be deposited in an archive by anyone. Therefore, there
is no simply way to find them.
Access, not price is the key (Kahle).
(112) The key here is access, not
price. Kahle wants to
enable free access to this content, but he also wants to enable
others to sell access to it. His aim is to ensure competition in
access to this important part of our culture. Not during the
commercial life of a bit of creative property, but during a second
life that all creative property has - a noncommercial life.
(113)
Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for
creative property does not hold true with the most important
components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. For these - television, movies, music, radio, the Internet
- there is no guarantee of a second life.
(114) Technology makes
it possible to imagine an archive of all books published, and
increasingly makes it possible to imagine an archive of all moving
images and sound.
(115) Technologies have thus removed the
economic costs of building such an archive. But lawyers' costs
remain.
CHAPTER TEN: Property
Valenti feels creative property owners should have same rights and protections as other property owners.
(117-118) [Valenti] “Creative property owners must be accorded the
same rights and protections resident in all other property owners in
the nation.”
(118) His views have no reasonable
connection to our actual legal tradition.
(118) But he speaks for
an industry that cares squat for our tradition and the values it
represents. He speaks for an industry that is instead fighting to
restore the tradition that the British overturned in 1710. In the
world that Valenti's changes would create, a powerful few would
exercise powerful control over how our creative culture would
develop.
(118-119) We have always treated rights in creative
property differently from the rights resident in all other property
owners. .. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having
less than perfect control.
(119) In the clause granting Congress
the power to create “creative property,” the Constitution
requires that after a “limited time,” Congress take back
the rights that it has granted and set the “creative property”
free to the public domain.
(121) Law is the most obvious
constraint (to lawyers, at least).
(122) the punishment of a norm
is imposed by a community, not (or not only) by the state.
(122)
The market is a third type of constraint. Its constraint is effected
through conditions.
(122) Finally, and for the moment, perhaps,
most mysteriously, “architecture” - the physical world as one
finds it - is a constraint on behavior.
(123) If we want to
understand the effective freedom that anyone has at a given moment to
do any particular thing, we have to consider how there four
modalities interact.
(123) The law, in other words, sometimes
operates to increase or decrease the constraint of a particular
modality.
(124) To understand the effective protection of liberty
or protection of property at any particular moment, we must track
these changes over time. A restriction imposed by one modality might
be erased by another. A freedom enable by one modality might be
displaced by another.
Why Hollywood Is Right
(126)
In response to the changes the Internet has effected, the White Paper
argued (1) Congress should strengthen intellectual property law, (2)
businesses should adopt innovative marketing technologies, (3)
technologists should push to develop code to protect copyrighted
material, and (4) educators should educate kids to better protect
copyright.
(128) It is the duty of policy makers, in other words,
to assure that the changes they create, in response to the request of
those hurt by changing technology, are changes that preserve the
incentives and opportunities for innovation and change.
(129) the
problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least
when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to
solve the problems that DDT was mean to solve.
(129) It is to this
image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle
appeals when he argues that we need an “environmentalism” for
culture. .. some of the ways in which we might protect authors will
have unintended consequences for the cultural environment, much like
DDT had for the natural environment.
(130) the net effect of these
changes will not be only the copyrighted work is effectively
protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive
increase in protection will be devastating to the environment for
creativity.
Beginnings
(131) It [the
Constitution] says that Congress has the power to
promote progress. The
grant of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not
the purpose of enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose
of rewarding authors.
Law: Duration
(133) In
1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal
copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the
author was alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt
to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not
renew the copyright, his work passed into the public domain.
(134)
Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has
an actual commercial life of just a couple of years.
Sonny Bono Act extended term to 95 years for works created before 1978.
(135) For all works created after 1978, there was only one copyright
term - the maximum term. For “natural” authors, that term was
life plus fifty years. For corporations, the term was seventy-five
years. Then, in 1992, Congress abandoned the renewal requirement for
all works created before 1978. All works still under copyright would
be accorded the maximum term then available. After the Sonny Bono
Act, that term was ninety-five years.
(135) The public domain is
orphaned by these changes in copyright law.
Law: Scope
(136) the
right covers practically any creative work that is reduced to a
tangible form. .. the right covers more creative work, protects the
creative work more broadly, and protects works that are based in a
significant way on the initial creative work.
(137) All of these
“formalities” were abolished in the American system when we
decided to follow European copyright law. There is no requirement
that you register a work to get a copyright; the copyright now is
automatic; the copyright exists whether or not you mark your work
with a ©; and the copyright exists whether or not you actually make
a copy available for others to copy.
(138) It is this derivative
right that would seem most bizarre to our framers, though it has
become second nature to us.
Law and Architecture: Reach
Reach of copyright law now publishers, users and authors.
(139) Whereas originally the law
regulated only publishers, the change in copyright's scope means that
the law today regulates publishers, users, and authors. It regulates
them because all three are capable of making copies, and the core of
the regulation of copyright law is copies.
(140) For while it may
be obvious that in the world before the Internet, copies were the
obvious trigger for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be
obvious that in the world with the Internet, copies should not
be the trigger for copyright law.
More precisely, they should not always
be the trigger for copyright
law.
(143) In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are
divided into three sorts: (1) unregulated uses, (2) regulated uses,
and (3) regulated uses that are nonetheless deemed “fair”
regardless of the copyright owner's views.
(143) Enter the
Internet - a distributed, digital network where every use of a
copyrighted work produces a copy. And because of this single,
arbitrary feature of the design of a digital network, the scope of
category 1 changes dramatically. Uses that before were presumptively
unregulated are now presumptively regulated. .. category 1 gets
sucked into category 2. And those who would defend the unregulated
uses of copyrighted work must look exclusively to category 3, fair
uses, to bear the burden of this shift.
(144) Congress did not
think through the collapse of the presumptively unregulated uses of
copyrighted works. .. Unregulated uses were an important part of free
culture before the Internet.
(144-145) However troubling the
expansion with respect to copying a particular work, it is
extraordinarily troubling with respect to transformative uses of
creative work.
(145) Third, this shift from category 1 to category
2 puts an extraordinary burned on category 3 (“fair use”) that
fair use never before had to bear.
(145) A thin protection
grounded in fair use makes sense when the vast majority of uses are
unregulated.
But when everything becomes presumptively regulated, then the
protections of fair use are not enough.
(146) Because each use of
the Internet produces a copy, use on the Internet becomes subject to
the copyright owner's control.
(147) Enabling technology to
enforce the control of copyright means that the control of copyright
is no longer defined by balanced policy. The control of copyright is
simply what private owners choose.
Architecture and Law: Force
(148)
On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because
on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but
by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as
interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology
that delivers copyrighted content. It is code, rather than law, that
rules.
Design software that counters these built in controls by intentionally giving away the content, such as the program source code.
(152) This is the future of
copyright law: not so much copyright law
as copyright code.
The controls over access to content will not be controls that are
ratified by courts; the controls over access to content will be
controls that are coded by programmers. And whereas the controls that
are built into the law are always to be checked by a judge, the
controls that are built into the technology have no similar built-in
check.
(157) The DMCA regulated devices that were designed to
circumvent copyright protection measures. It was designed to ban
those devices, whether or not the use of the copyrighted material
made possible by that circumvention would have been a copyright
violation.
(160) No
one ever died from copyright circumvention.
Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the
potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the
obvious and tragic harm they do.
(160) Using code, copyright
owners restrict fair use; using the DMCA, they punish those who would
attempt to evade the restrictions on fair use that they impose
through code. Technology becomes a means by which fair use can be
erased; the law of the DMCA backs up that erasing.
Code becomes law as controls built into technology automatically control access and are made illegal to circumvent.
(160) This is how code
becomes law.
The controls built into the technology of copy and access protection
becomes rules the violation of which is also a violation of the
law.
(161) Bots scouring the Net for trademark and copyright
infringement would quickly find your site. Your posting of fan
fiction, depending upon the ownership of the series that you're
depicting, could well inspire a lawyer's threat.
Thus there is appeal for dark networks that are inaccessible from the ordinary Internet.
(161) This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change in the ease with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts the law's balance radically.
Market: Concentration
(165)
The content of any show developed for a network is increasingly owned
by the network.
(165) While the number of channels has increased
dramatically, the ownership of those channels has narrowed to an ever
smaller and smaller few.
(168) This selectivity might be thought
inconsistent with the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court has held
that stations have the right to choose what they run. Thus, the major
channels of commercial media will refuse one side of a crucial debate
the opportunity to present its case. And the courts will defend the
rights of the stations to be this biased.
(168) If a handful of
companies control access to the media, and that handful of companies
gets to decide which political positions it will allow to be promoted
on its channels, then in an obvious and important way, concentration
matters.
Together
(169) Changes in
the past in response to changes in technology suggest that we may
well need similar changes in the future. And these changes have to be
reductions in
the scope of copyright, in reponse to the extraordinarily increase in
control that technology and the market enable.
Legal rights to control cultural development more concentrated than ever.
(170) Never in our
history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the
development of our culture than now.
(170)
Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this
historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation
of culture that our free society has known.
(171-172) Every realm
is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was not.
The law no regulates the full range of creativity - commercial or
not, transformative or not - with the same rules designed to regulate
commercial publishers.
(173) Free culture is increasingly the
casualty in this war on piracy.
PUZZLES
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Chimera
CHAPTER TWELVE: Harms
Constraining Creators
(184)
The technology of digital “capturing and sharing” promises a
world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and
broadly shared. And as that creativity is applied to democracy, it
will enable a broad range of citizens to use technology to express
and criticize and contribute to the culture all around.
(185) Can
common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum
fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine
for a doctor's negligently butchering a patient?
(185) The
consequence of this legal uncertainty, tied to these extremely high
penalties, is that an extraordinary amount of creativity will either
never be exercised, or never be exercised in the open.
Constraining Innovators
(188-189)
The consequence of this massive threat of liability tied to the murky
boundaries of copyright law is that innovators who want to innovate
in this space can safely innovate only if they have the sign-off from
last generation's dominant industries.
(197) While terrestrial
radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it
plays her hypothetical recording of “Happy Birthday” on the air,
Internet radio
does.
(199) The aim
is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that his platform of
potentially immense competition, which would cause the diversity and
range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to the
dinosaurs of old.
Corrupting Citizens
(199)
Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
Huge proportion of American population regularly violates laws while deeming itself a free society.
(201) We pride ourselves on our “free society,” but an endless
array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a
result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least
some law.
(205) the consequence of this transformation of the
American public into criminals is that it becomes trivial, as a
matter of due process, to effectively erase much of the privacy most
would presume.
(207) When forty to sixty million Americans are
considered “criminals” under the law, and when the law could
achieve the same objective - securing rights to authors - without
these millions being considered “criminals,” who is the villain?
Americans or the law? Which is American, a constant war on our own
people or a concerted effort through our democracy to change our law?
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
MARKING
4. Liberate the Music - Again
5. Fire Lots of Lawyers
Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free culture: the nature and future of creativity. New York: Penguin Books.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.