Free Culture

I just finished reading Lawrence Lessig's recent book, Free Culture, which I found so inspiring, I started writing YDO as my own blog on these issues.

Lessig is a professor of Constitutional Law at Stanford, and a deep thinker about "intellectual property issues" (and specifically, the subversion of copyright law as set forth in the Constitution by large media conglomerates).

His heartbreaking account of the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, is alone worth the price of the book. To see how easily the Supreme Court Justices, the epitome of all that is fair and reasonable, can overlook and ignore that which is so obviously right is extremely unnerving. Yet Lessig perseveres, and through him, we do as well. His proposed Eldred Act is a very reasonable way to protect the public domain from the grasping tentacles of the media giants. As Lessig says, they can have no reasonable objection to this Act. That they object speaks volumes about their true motivation: not the protection of artists, but the obliteration and outlawing of works that they do not control.