Lessig

Very cool... I do have a question that has hit me smack dab in the forehead and Im not done with the book. In Chapter Six you quote

"Parliament rejected their requests. As one pamphleteer put it, in words that echo today,
I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers.5"

Why has no one used this type of passage and changed it to the context of today? Does this not exactly state why copyrights should be left at a set term without continually being revisited and pushed out?

The internet is such a nice place, even though I know very little spanish, I went to http://world.altavista.com/ and entered Diego's text, it translated it for me to about what I thought it was. Just another example of how technology helps us all, or atleast me.

I sent an email before I realized I could post here. I'm just wondering if there are any plans on translating this book to Swedish.

I would not mind buying a number of copies in Swedish as gifts.

If there are no such plans, I could help, but translating the whole book by myself is too daunting a task for me right now.

Lawrence,

Several of the recent posts here have provoked me to respond.

Why is it that you (and Stewart Baker, apparently) seem so surprised that it is the Republican Party that is likely to embrace your vision of Free Culture? It is, after all, simply the logical end that a truthful examination of what being a free-market, less-government, conservative brings about. Labels are so misleading. We should care little about whether this movement is called neo-conservatism, libertarianism, market-liberalism, or any other misleading tag chosen to describe it. Free Culture, like blogging itself, is about the exchange of ideas and the ability to create freely. It is the country in which we want to live.

It is this common thread of what we can be and should be espoused by people like you, Randy Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, Lawrence Solum, Steve Antler, Eugene Volokh, and many others that drive this examination of where we are truly heading. The truth is that people don't understand intellectual property. Just the name puts people off. People don't care about copyright law. Not yet. But what is done today stands to shape what will be the most important area of property law in this century. That is why the fight for the de-monopolization of thise ideas is so important.

Politicians will only talk about things that the electorate cares about. How many more lawsuits by the RIAA against college students will it take before enough people care about what it means to live in a corporately-owned culture? But Stewart Baker is right about which party will be most likely to rein in the abuse of copyrights and patents. It will not be a candidate who is, as you describe, "inside-the-beltway-tone-deaf."

It wasn't going to be Howard Dean, either.

Les

After hearing you on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (www.wnyc.org... look for archives... he was on in 2nd hour...)
It seems that you now are dis-associating yourself from your previous effort to champion the UCITA laws.

Please comment???

Have you made a 180 degree turn around in your beliefs?
It seems that the ideas proposed in free culture absolutely refute the "draconinan" ideas on ownership proposed in the overhaul of the UCC laws regarding software proposed in UCITA, and the original version of the UCC laws.

THAT you PROPOSED, as the COMMITTEE reporter, if I recall correctly too!!!!

Please discuss???
thanks in advance

I hate to be a pooh bear but I am a little nonplussed that free culture is not "free."

Also a linked HTML version is presently in the process of being 'created' (reborn?) here.

As far as 'intellectual property', and for that matter, 'piracy', I do agree with RMS. In my reading of the book itself, 'intellectual property' has not been misrepresented in any way. It is, for better or worse (my opinion: Worse) a legal term which has to be addressed. As a human being, I find it's use abhorrent, but as someone who lives in a society structured by laws (perhaps instead of being structured by the founding ethics?), laws need to come more in line with ethics - and technology has ever been where these two deviate. From Galileo to File sharing.

Technology is not a student in this scenario. It's a teacher. Humanity likes to think that humanity is the master of technology. We are as much masters as slaves; we have the potential to be as empowered as we are to be disempowered. As Richard Feynman liked to say of his trip to a Buddhist temple, humanity is given a key which can unlock both Heaven or Hell.

Ask Oppenheimer.

On the flip side, change scares, therefore technology scares, and it scares people who don't understand. They just happen to be in authority, and pen the laws. Now. But in the future generations?

I rambled. Sorry.

phr, that's what the Wikipedia is for. See the post above yours :)

Daran, AAron's blog post announcing that wiki is brilliant:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001194

But there's no explicit copyright on the wiki itself, which under the post-1977 copyright law, means there's no permission for anyone else to copy it. Aaron might not even be able to fix that without getting everyone who's already contributed to agree explicitly, or else throwing out all existing contributions and starting over from Larry's text. There's also that tree-structured HTML version, which seems to have been done mostly for the purpose of selling the structured-documentation software that generated it. If that's the case, whoever did it might not be willing to permit anyone to make modified versions of the HTML file. The CC Share-Alike clause stops all of these problems and it really would make it easier and more rewarding for more people to improve the book.

Diego says (my own Chicano translation)� �I share Brian�s opinion, the electronic edition of �Free Culture� is crisp (sharp, clear). We thank Professor Lessig for his work and especially for making his latest book available, in a form that we can read, discuss, comment and expand upon en Ecuador - South America.�