Recently I added Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture PDF to my iPod. I’ll talk about the iPod as an e-reader some other time. Today I would like to mention some of the high points in Lessig’s book with was released under a Creative Commons license.
Free Culture starts with some stories from history showing how copyright was evolved from protecting the public from monopolistic publishers hundreds of years ago to protecting certain business models in modern times. There are many specific examples demonstrating how individuals and industries have been affected by copyright law.
I plan to add chapter ten to my required reading for classes that cover copyright. This is the Property chapter and it goes through the entire history of US copyright law. Starting with fourteen years of copyright protection in 1790 for those authors that chose to register works. As it turned out, about 95% of the works produced during this time were never registered, so they were not protected by copyright.
Having the ability to “choose” to protect a work by copyright is something that law now prevents. Today, everything that is written is automatically protected by copyright. This prevents the increase in what Free Culture describes as a normal pool of public domain works that can be freely used to create new works.
The main idea behind Lessig’s book is that we should rethink copyright law now that we have the Internet. If you connect Lessig’s ideas with the need I talked about last summer, we need to cultivate the creativity in our culture.