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Recently I added Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture<\/a> PDF<\/a> to my iPod.\u00a0 I’ll talk about the iPod as an e-reader some other time.\u00a0 Today I would like to mention some of the high points in Lessig’s book with\u00a0was released under a Creative Commons license.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 There are many specific examples demonstrating how individuals and industries have been affected by copyright law.<\/p>\n I plan to add chapter ten to my required reading for classes that cover copyright.\u00a0 This is the Property chapter and it goes through the entire history of US copyright law.\u00a0 Starting with\u00a0fourteen years of copyright protection in 1790 for those authors that chose to register works.\u00a0 As it turned out, about 95% of the works produced during this time were never registered, so they were not protected by copyright.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having the ability to “choose” to protect a work by copyright is something that law now prevents.\u00a0 Today, everything that is written is automatically protected by copyright.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The main idea behind Lessig’s book is that we should rethink copyright law now that we have the Internet.\u00a0 If you connect Lessig’s ideas with the need I talked about last summer<\/a>, we need to cultivate the creativity in our culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I added Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture PDF to my iPod.\u00a0 I’ll talk about the iPod as an e-reader some other time.\u00a0 Today I would like to mention some of the high points in Lessig’s book with\u00a0was released under a … Continue reading