Free Culture

Peter Wayner writes: "When jury duty called, I was lucky enough to have a copy of Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, to take along. The Mitchell Courthouse in Baltimore is one of the most beautiful and ambitious marble allegories for how the law can be elegant, ornate, and permanently imposing. It was the perfect place to read a new book devoted to stopping the old guard media czars from using law to keep the couch potatoes down." Read on for the rest of Wayner's review of the book -- which is released today in hardcover, but also available for free online.

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
author	Lawrence Lessig
pages	388
publisher	Penguin
rating	9
reviewer	Peter Wayner
ISBN	0375505784
summary	Lessig takes a serious but accessible look at how law has been subverted by Big Media and proposes workable steps for taking it back.

Lessig is now famous for a number of reasons, including his two previous books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. In the first, he was one of the first to affirm what many Slashdot readers know almost instinctively: whomever writes the code determines how the world works. Making the right decisions about power and control when designing a computer system is just as important as writing laws for the future. In the second, he writes of the importance of a vast cultural commons which acts as the wellspring for our expression and the grounding plate for our souls.

His new book is his most casual and most accessible. His prose is improving as he drops the footnote-heavy habit of legal writing and adopts a bloggier style driven by anecdotes and personal revelation. And what anecdotes he has -- Lessig's years on the barricades have given a surprisingly large collection of tales that will make any artist or citizen cringe. Time and time again, the powerful warlords of the entertainment conglomerates have banded together to try to stomp out the sharing and cooperation emerging from the Internet. After years of amassing a strangehold on the world's culture, the conglomerates aren't letting this cheap, fast and out-of-control technology sweep it all away.

My favorite anecdote, if one could be said to stand out, comes from a film maker documenting an opera company. When the camera caught a snippet of the stagehands watching the Simpsons with the sound turned down, the director wanted to add a four-second clip to the movie. Matt Groening said "Yes." The lawyers said it was clearly fair use. But Fox's executives responded with the kind of obscenity that doesn't upset the FCC: pay us $10,000. The clip didn't make the film because the director couldn't afford to go head-to-head with the Fox legal department.

This is just one of a number of stories of how interesting, invigorating content and innovation was strangled at birth by old guard. The anecdotes are, I think, an effort to atone for his loss in the Eldred case and reargue it. He presented the Supreme Court with a very logical and legal reading of why it was wrong for Congress to continue extending the length of a copyright monopoly and the court didn't buy it. A friend of his said that this tack was wrong because the court wanted to feel the depths of the injustice. The justices didn't want laws and footnotes, they wanted something human. Lessig blames his loss on not taking this advice. (As an aside, Lessig's personal description of taking a case to the Supreme Court is a good way to understand just how human the game can be.)

This time around, he piles the examples on top of more examples to show just how the conglomerates can hurt the artist and culture in general. After this case failed, Lessig tried another compromise that exposed the true goals of the copyright czars. Lessig describes his efforts to recreate a copyright registration system. If someone wanted to keep a copyright in force after 50 years, Lessig suggested getting them to pay a $1 fee. This would help everyone keep the copyright straight and make it simpler for everyone to understand just who has what rights to an art work. Any art work that goes unregistered flops into the public domain. Anyone who's tried to clear rights to a project will see this as a step in the right direction. The copyright industry, however, rejected this structure in a way that Lessig suggests illustrates how much this is about power and control, not creativity and expression.

Lessig has other tricks up his sleeve. If he can't convince the U.S. government to change the law, he can appeal to the artists themselves who have the ultimate control. He started his Creative Commons project several years ago and now artists can use several boilerplate licenses that reserve some of the rights while releasing others.

This new book itself is also available for free (PDF) under the license, a tactic that has worked well for Cory Doctorow and myself in the past. When I released Free for All under the license several years after the book was published, I watched the asking price on Amazon's used book market rise more than 40%. It wasn't a big jump, but it was still a bit counterintuitive. The freely available text encouraged people to buy the more readable printed version. I think Lessig will see the same effect. The sales driven by the people who read the electronic version will be greater than the sales lost to the people who just read the downloaded copy.

The good news is that the markets and the consumers are already heeding Lessig's advice because they instinctively disdain a monopoly. The power of the old networks is rapidly disappearing and the increasing concentration among the old guard is as much an illustration of the last ditch effort by the executives to cash out by taking large bonuses from the transactions. Some worry about the concentration of power in the radio world by companies like Clear Channel. But who listens to radio for music any longer? One Clear Channel station near my house plays traffic reports every 10 minutes during the day because their audience is dominated by people trapped on aptly named "parkways". The station may play as few as three songs an hour between 6:30am and 9am. The rest of the time, they yak about movies or the weather and their influence upon music continues to drop.

There are surprisingly good alternatives developing to take over the space. Lessig does an excellent job describing how the Internet radio stations were mugged with unfair regulations, but it's important to remember that they continue to exist because they offer something better than endless traffic reports. Furthermore, competition is coming from strange places. Starbucks is just one such company selling commercial- free mix tapes that are, for almost all intents and purposes, just a plastic disk version of a cool DJ. More and more radio-like venues are appearing.

There are other reasons why the concentration is backfiring. Lessig does a good job explaining how the television networks are squeezing out competition from independent producers. He describes how Norman Lear was only able to bring us "All in the Family" because he was free to take his work from ABC to CBS. That freedom disappeared after Congress repealed the laws forbidding the networks from owning stakes in the shows they broadcast. Now, if you want to get on CBS, it helps to sell a part of your show to CBS or, even better, just sell the whole thing.

But is this strategy really working for the networks? Their ratings continue to plummet. There's a reason why there are so many drug commercials for arthritis remedies on network air. That generation is the last one who watches network television almost instinctively. Lessig likes to complain about the "soviet" nature of these networks. It's a wonderful word that reads on many levels. The more they squeeze out competition and aggregate power in the committees, the more they lose the fluid competition that lets cream rise to the top.

So, who really cares if CBS isn't available on the Dish network? There are hundreds of other channels offering good fare. It was a different story in the 1970's when there were only three networks and CBS offered shows like "All in the Family" and "Mary Tyler Moore". Then, they controlled the heart of our popular culture. Today, the network ratings are so low on Saturday night that all of the networks are looking for a way to stop broadcasting on that day. Aside from the NCAA basketball tournament, I've lived without CBS for years without missing a thing. (Even then, I get most sports news from the websites.) The DVD player is a very, very powerful and destructive technology. When you can buy 50 movies for $30, who even needs CBS, the Dish network or HBO?

All of these idea swirled through my mind as I read Lessig's book and waited during jury duty. Are things getting worse or better? Are the 40+ million plus fileswapping pirates winning, or are the draconian laws crushing our creativity like a jackboot? I spent my time thinking of this balance while waiting for the judge and the attorneys to sift through 150 people to find the right 12 folks to render a fair and impartial verdict. On one hand, it was remarkable that society was being so careful before imprisoning someone for attempted murder. On the other, it was clear that the effort can't be sustained for the 40 million+ file sharing pirates who are thumbing their nose at the law.

Lessig understands this. One of his most persuasive arguments is that the current law becomes more marginalized as it becomes increasingly less fair. Prohibition of alcohol corroded the law and now the increasing prohibition of fair use is eroding respect for copyright.You only need to travel a few blocks from the Mitchell court house to end up in dangerous regions of Baltimore where the marble and the pomp can't do much to protect you. Lessig, the lawyer, knows the law can only work when it is fair and equitable. This new book is a strong and passionate argument for how we can restore some sanity to the system and restore our faith in copyright law. Some people think that Lessig is trying to "smash" the copyright system, but I think he's just trying to restore its ability to function.

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Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All , a book on the open source movement and Policing Online Games, a book on how to build the Mitchell courthouse in cyberspace. You can purchase Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. mpawlo points out you can get the book free and gratis via Bittorrent.

Lawrence Lessing on NPR

IJWTS that Lawrence Lessing gave a fine interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" this past Tuesday. More info, and the interview in RealAudio format, here [npr.org].

EU... Microsoft... Monopoly

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My favorite anecdote, if one could be said to stand out, comes from a film maker documenting an opera company. When the camera caught a snippet of the stagehands watching the Simpsons with the sound turned down, the director wanted to add a four-second clip to the movie. Matt Groening said "Yes." The lawyers said it was clearly fair use. But Fox's executives responded with the kind of obscenity that doesn't upset the FCC: pay us $10,000. The clip didn't make the film because the director couldn't afford to go head-to-head with the Fox legal department
-----

And that, folks, is just how it's going to be done.

Jury duty

When jury duty called, I was lucky enough to have a copy of Larry Lessig's new book...

Hey, how about actually doing your civic duty? I wouldn't want to be the defendant in this case.

Re:Jury duty

My "civic duty" involved sitting there. Just sitting there. Some watched a movie. Some read books. Others just talked.

Why PDF?

pdf is an waful format to make derivative works from. for example, I would like to bake a plucker [plkr.org]-ebook for my palm from it, but with acrobats text export function as the only available export tool, it screws footnotes and page numbers etc.

DON'T use pdf for book distribution!

Re:Why PDF?

Why PDF?

1. Almost everyone knows what PDF is and has the reader.
2. It's better than sharing Word files.
3. Reader is available for most platforms. Open source readers are available for those not officially supported.
4. It preserves the look of documents across hardware and platforms.

In other words it's the most practical of the popular formats. Everything I make available online is in PDF. Maybe it doesn't have some pet feature that you have in mind, but that's no reason to go with some obscure format that is probably broken in other ways.

Re:Why PDF?

DON'T use pdf for book distribution!
No, please DO use pdf for book distribution. It is the most widely supported format that has all the features you need and is open enough.

DON'T however write the book strait into pdf. Use something like DocBook, which can be converted into many formats after the fact, and will probably make your life easier anyway.

Re:Why PDF?

Perhaps Lessig might release the TeX (or whatever he wrote it in) version too if asked nicely.

Soo..

When jury duty called, I was lucky enough to have a copy of Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, to take along.

Did being informed on some subject get you out of jury duty?

When I sat through my jury selection process it seemed those who were well informed got the boot. Either side could choose to excuse someone too informed to make their chosen impression on.

So it goes within a free society.

Error in Link

I thought that letting subscribers look into the "mysterious future" was supposed to help us not to have broken links.

Here's the fixed link. [state.md.us]

Broken link

Here's a working link to the Mitchell courthouse, [state.md.us] sans magical Slashdot link space...

Is that a word?

His prose is improving as he [...] adopts a bloggier style

Did I read that correctly?

Did he just say "bloggier" ?

Revealing, no?

It was the perfect place to read a new book devoted to stopping the old guard media czars from using law to keep the couch potatoes down.

I suppose that's meant to be facetious but it leads nicely into "Are things getting worse or better? Are the 40+ million plus fileswapping pirates winning, or are the draconian laws crushing our creativity like a jackboot?" Yeah, "fileswapping pirates" are the cornerstone of global creativity. What will our society do without their invaluable contribution?

I'm the first to object to the DMCA and abuse of fair-use but if the Lessig crowd wants to convince me that there's a need to tear the existing system to shreds, they need to come up with a better victim class than Kazaa users.

Mod parent up. Also:

More than that:

Are the 40+ million plus fileswapping pirates winning, or are the draconian laws crushing our creativity like a jackboot?

Apart from being inflammatory, this question sets up a false dichotomy, which presupposes that fileswappers help innovation. Yet this is far from proven, given that almost all of the files shared by fileswappers are the same pop culture materials produced by the conglomerates.

The reading of the review is not terribly critical, and is more like a rant.

Does fair use widely exist anymore?

I find it tragic that what may have been assumed to be fair use a few decades ago . . . is now still protected by fair use, but now one needs an army of lawyers to protect their fair use claim.

My personal thought is that this is an irrational fear stemming from the popularity of home printers, video editing software, and the internet (all of which weren't easily available 20 years ago); it is now much easier for someone to "fairly use" copyrighted material in their own work. In the opinion of the media conglomerates this "devalues" their intellectual property so rather than allow fair use to proceed legally, they fight it in hopes that most of the little guys will just give up trying or cower in fear of the onslaught of lawyers.

Re:Does fair use widely exist anymore?

Much of Fair Use has effectively been outlawed by the DMCA. If you buy a copyrighted work, you have the Fair Use right to make a backup copy, etc. But if the distributor has included any sort of copy protection, it is illegal to bypass the protection scheme - even though you have legal rights to the work!

We will have to start demanding fair use rights more as consumers to win them back.

America Going Down The Toilet

There is considerable historical material that demonstrates that societies that muzzle their creative instincts go to the rubbish bin of history faster then most. This is the danger that the U.S. faces. There is a common thread in Lessig's complaints about copyright laws, the DMCA, the SCO/Linux lawsuits, dumb patent laws and of course Microsoft's monopoly. By locking up IP you stifle the creative capabilities of the U.S. What happens if you do this? Well, the creative people either give up or move offshore to countries that do not have such restrictive rules. There they can disassemble, reverse engineer, tinker and fiddle to their hearts content without needing a bevy of lawyers. You can seee it coming now. Europe, Russia, China and maybe India are going to dominate the software industry as long as they avoid getting tied up in U.S. sponsored IP laws. The last two programs I bought are DVD backup software - from Switzerland and Germany. I don't think the software can even be legally sold in the U.S. thanks to the MPAA. "Freedom to innovate in the U.S.?" - I don't think so.

It's going to take more than 4 seconds...

...of The Simpsons to save an opera documentary.

Fair use = Documentary, satire, or lawyers

My favorite anecdote, if one could be said to stand out, comes from a film maker documenting an opera company. When the camera caught a snippet of the stagehands watching the Simpsons with the sound turned down, the director wanted to add a four-second clip to the movie. Matt Groening said "Yes." The lawyers said it was clearly fair use. But Fox's executives responded with the kind of obscenity that doesn't upset the FCC: pay us $10,000. The clip didn't make the film because the director couldn't afford to go head-to-head with the Fox legal department.

What a sad ancedote that shows how the conglomerates undermine the creativity and quality of new content. It seems that if it's not a research article . . . you better claim you're making an editorial or a satire (two well protected examples of fair use) or you better have a team of lawyers on retainer.

They did it to themselves

One thing that amuses me about this whole Media-Corporations-trying-to-reel-in-technology fiasco is how much of it they create themselves. For instance, the mpeg and mpeg2 (DVD) formats were devised by these big companies. So was digital HDTV. It was these media powerhouses that forced the change from analog to digital.

Then, one day, they say "Oh crap!" all of our media is digital and can be easily copied! We need to control it much better. Then they try to implement all sorts of technology to stop sharing that, in many cases, degrades the quality back to the analog level... or worse!

Where do they find these people?

Didn't want laws and footnotes??

The justices didn't want laws and footnotes, they wanted something human.

How foolish of Lessig, to think that a Supreme Court Justice might put an emphasis on the actual law and its logical implications.

Sheez. You'd think they were a freakin jury off the street. No wonder the law is such a mess these days.

Clear Channel

Some worry about the concentration of power in the radio world by companies like Clear Channel. But who listens to radio for music any longer?

I think the real change that Clear Channel has brought about is this:

Stores used to pay companies like muzak [muzak.com] to pipe in a pacifying soundtrack for our shopping pleasure. But in the last ten years businesses have figured out that e.g. an actual Hall and Oates song is just as muzakky as an orchestral arrangement of a Hall and Oates song. (No offense to Mr. Hall, Mr. Oates or any other pop entertainers, but there it is.)

Using this insight, Clear Channel is providing a pacifying soundtrack to our stuck-at-work/stuck-in-traffic pleasure.

Information is Death.

You cannot defeat Death. You cannot defeat Information. Both are examples of Infinity.

As in, there is a lot of both around, it is a free substance.

People should be taught to -play- music, not buy it.

Ayn Rand strikes again

When I read Mr. Lessig's talks Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" comes to mind. Big business rewriting our laws to suit themselves. As I've said in the past - monopolies and big business are nothing more than kingdoms and everyone else are the serfs.

Kingdoms are monopolies. Do as the king says or else. It used to be the church which ran kingdoms from behind the throne. (Do it or be excommunicated.) Now it is big business. (Do it or we will change the laws to force you to do it.)

The secret is - laws are just so many words on pieces of paper. Some words are just but many are not. Some governments are just - but many are not. Why else do you think that third world countries continue to have so many problems? And why do we?

I tell you what! I just had an idea! Why don't we have a national black-out day? One where no one gets on the net for 24 hours! Nobody answers the phone. Nobody goes to work. Noone goes out to eat. Talk about scare big business. That would speak a lot louder than any speech given by anyone.

Prohibition and respect for the law.

One of his most persuasive arguments is that the current law becomes more marginalized as it becomes increasingly less fair. Prohibition of alcohol corroded the law and now the increasing prohibition of fair use is eroding respect for copyright.

That alone is an incredibly brilliant statement.

A second review of 'Free Culture'

I've just published a review of Lessig's Free Culture on my weblog here [newmediamusings.com]. Here's the ending:

The giant of cyberlaw has a few prescriptions for this sad state of affairs. One is Creative Commons, the organization housed at Stanford that gives creators greater freedom over how to manage and share their digital handiworks. But a more fundamental solution lies in Lessig's call for Congress to revisit the very basis of copyright to shorten copyright terms and, importanty, to rewire its fundamentals so that everything on the Internet does not automatically fall into the regulatory black hole governed by copyright law. Lessig suggests (as others have done) remixing the law so that copyright comes into play not when someone makes a copy of something for personal use but only when someone is engaged in the true piracy of profiteering.

His final suggestion is one of his best: Fire lots of lawyers.

Re:Why I won't use GPL software

Demanding the source and embracing capitalism goes perfectly well.

I've worked for several companys who demanded the source for almost everything (for their embedded products). They even had to more to get the source. But when there where problems they could diagnose and solve them themselfs. Instead of being dependent on third party support.

Re:Couch Potatoes Deserve to be Kept Down

... prestidgeous Ivy League degree ....

...Stop thinking like a couch potatoe.

Dan? Is that you?

Re:The Trouble With Larry

Yet another person stupider than a monkey. [yahoo.com] (For an explanation, see this post [slashdot.org].)

Re:The Trouble With Larry

Lessig's response [lessig.org] can be read at his blog [lessig.org]

Re:Couch Potatoes Deserve to be Kept Down

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The real smart ones stay on and become graduate students and the smarter ones again become TFs
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You're ignoring the financial aspect. The "real smart ones" that don't have enough financial backing to shield them from the demands of modern life go on to get boring jobs.

Oh wait. If you're at an Ivy League school you're inundated with yuppie brats who don't need to worry about the financial backing that it takes to tread water in everyday life.

Okay. Your point about couch potatoes is probably 99.998% true in your environment.

Re:Couch Potatoes Deserve to be Kept Down

The couch potatoes go on to lead boring everyday lives where they just tread water.

Or get elected to the US Senate, followed by eight years as Vice President of the US. Nowhere near as exciting as being a teacher, I'm sure, but it ain't exactly treading water, either.

Re:The Trouble With Larry

Though "cut and paste" was limited to scrapbooks, creators of all stripes somehow managed to flourish.

the things we are cutting and pasting from is no longer magazines and newspapers, why should that change anything?

movies and websites are now our "scrapbooks" and nothing should be different.

"Free Mickey!"

I've often thought the same thing, though along slightly different lines.

Someone -- more or less anonymous -- should come up with some kind of protest cartoon involving Mickey Mouse. Preferably, it shouldn't be too hard for moderately artistic people to draw. Then, everyone who cares should sport this cartoon on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and whatever. The design should not be sold; rather, people should reproduce it themselves, or reproduce it and share it with others.

Web pages are a little dicey -- at least at first. You can be tracked and sent cease-and-desist letters. But, shirts and bumper stickers and homemade greeting cards will escape censure.

What I'm really talking about is a grass roots movement. All the "Free Mitnick" graffiti has worn off by now -- it's time to replace it with "Free Mickey!"

The REAL Problem With Larry

The real problem with Larry is that he does NOT want to get rid of copyrights. Sadly, he more than anyone else should understand the harm they cause, but instead of pushing to get rid of them - he is acting like a sellout - making like it is more important to get along with the 'copyright lords' then it is to have freedom in the information age.

Of course, the 'copyright lords' know this and are all to happy to expolit him to persue their own agenda. I hate to say this, but the more Larry waffles about, the more he desperately tries to get along - the more he just sets himself up to be strung along like a doggie on a leash and for the rest of us to get screwed.

What I mean, is that by avoiding a direct fight against copyrights today, and avoiding blatent civil disobedience, all he is doing is making the pain we're going to suffer tommorow worse. All that's going to happen, is that the 'copyright lords' will get more power and more abusive - and when it does come down to the ineviatable fight, more people will suffer.

Re:Why I won't use GPL software

Let's be clear: Your saying you refuse to use GPLed software becouse the GPL requires the releace of source code to the public..
That requirement only kicks in if you modify an existing GPL application and distribute that same application.

Fine.. so you want to modify other peoples programs and distribute them. Any software that dosen't permit this you won't use.

Now..
What operating system do you use?
What web browser do you use?

Becouse I'd like to know what web browser you can modify and distribute in binary only that runs under an operating system that also permits you to modify and distribute.