Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity » (Reprint)

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He has clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. The author of The Future of Ideas and Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

The New York Times

The shrinking of the public domain, and the devastation it threatens to the culture, are the subject of a powerfully argued and important analysis by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading member of a group of theorists and grass-roots activists, sometimes called the ''copyleft,'' who have been crusading against the increasing expansion of copyright protections. Lessig was the chief lawyer in a noble, but ultimately unsuccessful, Supreme Court challenge to the copyright extension act. Free Culture is partly a final appeal to the court of public opinion and partly a call to arms. — Adam Cohen