Free Culture – do you take blue or red pill? Decide now.
Free Culture by prof. Lawrence Lessig can be – just like in The Matrix – your choice between blue and red pill. You can decide not to read it and keep believing what you were made to believe.
If you read it, you will finally clearly see a lot of things, that you probably already feel about copyright, mp3 downloads and so called piracy.
I know that you may be just about to close this page and think that it must be some extremely boring stuff, if it is written by a professor. To make things worse, the man is a professor of law.
If you want you can download this book here – (right click and save target as to download instead of opening in browser). The download is obviously free.
Free Culture is about Internet, piracy, copyright and creativity. It is about the way those things influence each other and our lives. It is easy to read and interesting. It is by no means a boring academic book, as it is written for ordinary people. It is funny, eye-opening and terrifying at the same time.
I can reassure you, that if you read this book, it will change the way you look at mp3 downloads and piracy. You will see, how copyright law evolved to its current, most restrictive in history, form. You will see, how corporations, labels and rights owners successfully manage to make the law more and more severe to serve their needs and safeguard their undue gains.
You will see, how fundamentally wrong is the way we perceive “intellectual property” nowadays and who stands behind it. If you “illegally” download music and sometimes feel bad about it, this book will give you base to distinguish what is right and what is wrong by yourself.
You will see, that there is a difference between ownership of a car and ownership of a song. You were made to believe, that this is the same thing. This book will explain to you, what the difference is.
You will see, how miserable some of the independent artists are jumping on a string of the corpos, hoping that stricter copyright law will give them at least a tiny slice of the cake.
Please, do take the red pill, read the book and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
A little quote:
“…while the Internet has indeed produced something fantastic and new, our government,
pushed by big media to respond to this “something new,” is
destroying something very old. Rather than understanding the changes
the Internet might permit, and rather than taking time to let “common
sense” resolve how best to respond, we are allowing those most threatened
by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more
importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about
who we have always been.
We allow this, I believe, not because it is right, and not because
most of us really believe in these changes. We allow it because the interests
most threatened are among the most powerful players in our
depressingly compromised process of making law. This book is the
story of one more consequence of this form of corruption—a consequence
to which most of us remain oblivious.”
See also:
Stop stealing our music you little scum – and who says this?
