Free culture (book)

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Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture - How Big Media Companies Use Technology and Law to Lock Up Culture and Control Creativity is a 2004 book by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig . It was posted on March 25, 2004 at the Creative Commons license cc-by-nc 1.0 was released. The printed edition of the book is published by Penguin Books under full copyright protection . The English original title is: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The book was published in German under the title Free Culture, Essence and Future of Creativity in printed form in January 2006 by Open Source Press.

“There has never been a time in history when more of our“ culture ”was“ owned ”than it is today. In addition , never before has the concentration of power in controlling the use of culture been so unquestionably accepted as it is today. "

- p. 22/23

background

Lessigs is one of a whole series of books and essays that expressed concerns about the future of copyright law and its effects on culture and technology at the turn of the millennium.

Position in the factory

Free Culture is the third of four books so far in which the constitutional lawyer deals with issues of copyright, freedom, culture and the Internet. In code , he shows how the infrastructure of the Internet can also be used for control, in the future of ideas such as political and social endeavors exist to limit the innovation and freedom of the Internet. In the book "Free Culture" he goes one step further and states that the entire environment of creativity is endangered by changing laws on intellectual property, changes in technology and the increasing concentration of the media.

Lessig presented the basic ideas of the book for the first time in the keynote at OSCon 2002, and in January 2008 he announced that he would give his last lecture primarily on topics of free culture and dedicate himself to corruption in Washington and the attacked American democracy. He builds on Lessig's work in the Eldred v. Ashcroft , in which he tried unsuccessfully to attack the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998, which significantly extended American copyright protection. The decision stood in a number of other court decisions, for example on Napster or DeCSS , which always favored the owners of copyrights against their users.

content

History of Copyright and Current Developments

Lessig traces a history of American copyright law in the area of ​​tension between author and consumer interests. According to Lessig, the law managed to maintain a balance between the two interests and to adapt to technical changes. In recent years, however, the legal system has gotten out of hand. Lessig is primarily concerned with copyright law, but assumes that similar developments also exist in other areas of intellectual property rights.

Lessig analyzed the tension between the concepts of Schwarzkopiererei ( piracy ) and the property in the field of intellectual property . Here he sees threats from three factors: an increasingly concentrated media landscape that can influence politics, changes in the underlying technology that allow far-reaching control, and changes in the law that were solely in favor of the media conglomerates. While copyright in the USA was once limited to 14 years and only prohibited direct reproductions, the right has been extended over time and now includes numerous types of copying, editing and transformation. Far from protecting the actual work, copyright now also covers individual ideas or aspects.

The technical developments of the last decades make it possible at the same time to monitor the use and appropriation of works with previously unknown thoroughness, while the control costs drop dramatically. The new possibilities of processing and creative appropriation that these techniques also offer are threatened by developments in law and economy. While it is possible under certain circumstances to obtain permission from rights holders, this is usually cumbersome and costly. A "permit culture" is the opposite of a "free culture."

According to Lessig, there has been an unprecedented process of concentration in the media over the past 20 years. The interests of the media industry consist primarily in the accumulation of capital and less in the free exchange of ideas. The products that this economy produces are sterile, safe and homogeneous. At the same time, they used the compromised American legislative process as a form of corruption to enforce laws on their behalf.

Eldred v. Ashcroft

The book also records his defense in the Eldred v. Ashcroft and his attempt to get what was internally known as the Eldred Act into Congress. According to Lessig, this draft law would, depending on your perspective, operate as the Public Domain Enhancement Act or the Copyright Deregulation Act (law to deregulate copyright law ).

Copyright and Creativity

Lessig shows by way of example how art came about through the appropriation and reworking of the ideas of others. Even the great rights holders of today have all benefited in one way or another from other people's works when they were created. Lessig proves that every industry that advocates strong copyrights today benefited from the limited legal protection of the time when it came into being. Lessig goes into the publishing houses, the film industry, the photo industry, the radio and the cable companies. Sometimes they used works that were still free under the conditions at the time, or they rightly assumed a lack of law enforcement. In these cases, the appropriators portrayed by Lessig were usually sued, but the rights had already expired when the effective prosecution began, or the legislature was looking for a compromise that did not remove the new in favor of the old.

Lessig contrasts the stories from the early days of the media industry with current developments in which he describes the laborious process of creating something creative today and in which intellectual property rights either prevented or massively hindered the creative process. As an example, he cites a CD-ROM about the life's work of Clint Eastwood, for which just obtaining the necessary rights for all directors, producers and actors took over a year. He also describes the filmmaker Jon Else's attempt to incorporate a four-second excerpt from The Simpsons into a documentary about the making of a ring recording for the San Francisco Opera . An attempt that ultimately failed because rights holder Fox's licensing requirements exceeded the budget and the producer did not want to provoke a lengthy dispute in court despite presumably existing exceptional rights in copyright law.

Lessig describes the establishment of the legal instrument of fair use as largely ineffective. Rights holders would pursue an aggressive policy of prosecution so that legitimate uses would lead to legal disputes and many legitimate users would be deterred in advance. Many further users of creative works insist that all rights are "cleared", that is, used with the permission of the owner, even if it is clearly fair use. The attack on peer2peer - sharing compares Lessig with the use of DDT for plant protection. Measures against the file sharing networks would be helpful against an evil, but at the same time would destroy the entire creative ecosystem that they create with the file sharing networks.

Political Consequences

In addition to the consequences for culture, Lessig also sees consequences for the political system in the United States. For the health of a democratic system it is essential to be able to fall back on existing culture, to broaden it, to comment on it, to change it and to create something new out of it. Legal and technical developments together impair the ability to fall back on one's own culture. Ultimately, social practices that are needed for the functioning of a democracy are in danger.

Suggested actions

Lessig understands the free culture he is striving for as permeated by a multitude of private property rights. He advocates the market and the commercial exploitation of intellectual creations. However, if misused, these rights can threaten and limit culture. In the afterword to his book, he makes suggestions on how the danger to a free culture can be averted. To this end, he divides the proposals into two categories: proposals that anyone can implement immediately, and proposals that require action by the legislature.

Lessig suggests that individuals should use innovative concepts to disseminate content. For example, through the use of Creative Commons licenses. The model proposed by Free Software pioneer Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation of making content available for free does not contradict business models like those of Westlaw and LexisNexis . These receive money from subscribers for the provision of public domain content, using licenses created by Lessig's organization Creative Commons . They should also get involved politically for free content or more data protection .

In the area of ​​legislation, Lessig advocates a formally more complicated way of obtaining copyrights. Among other things, this would make it clearer who owns the rights to a work and from whom they can be obtained. He has a different system in mind than the necessary formalities that existed in the American legal system until 1976. Lessig advocates the establishment of shorter periods for copyright protection , which, if there is interest, can be extended with the least possible effort. He calls for a system like the one before the law reform of 1976, before which the average copyright was valid for about 32 years. He assumes that for about 94% of the works when the copyright protection expires, there is no longer any commercial interest in exploiting them, and it would be a great waste to withhold them from the public domain. Lessig also advocates a limitation of copyright with regard to derived rights. For example, he might want to limit a publisher's ability to prevent copies of an author's book from being published on the Internet for non-commercial purposes. He also takes up the suggestion of William W. Fisher from Harvard Law School , according to which the state should regulate the licensing of intellectual property by law, for example with radio ( compulsory license ), and the respective creator should then share the revenue according to the download figures is involved.

reception

The book received worldwide attention outside of the closer legal discussion. Lessig brought the concept of a "free culture" to a broader audience for the first time, and created certain principles and definitions for the movement itself to which it could commit. In his "Manifesto" he removed the idea of open source from the field of software and made it popular for other types of work.

The contemporary scientific reception was rather skeptical. Virginia law professor Julia D. Mahoney describes the book as the culmination of overheated rhetoric that borders on the apocalyptic. To support his thesis that a catastrophe was just beginning to break in, Lessig would overlook the numerous problems of copyright law prior to 1976 while interpreting the latest developments one-sidedly.

While Lessig proclaims the threat to culture, he actually shows above all the creative energies and cultural freedom that the Internet could set free. The individual cases and examples that Lessig considers are well selected and represent impressive illustrations of the complex relationship between human society and intellectual property rights. In fact, the facts that he describes are significantly more complex, richer and also more interesting than the one-dimensional thesis, which he deduces from it.

The sociologist David Granzian also praises the description of the interaction between progress and legal developments, and the worrying developments that they bring with them. However, he also accuses Lessig of interpreting his examples in an extreme manner and of inadmissibly generalizing them too much. He would represent a one-sided determinism similar to that of the supporters of the digital age.

Derivative works

A day after the book was posted on the Internet, a popular blog writer suggested that people pick a chapter, speak, and record. In part, this happened because it was possible under license. Most of the book was recorded just two days later. In addition to the audio recordings, the book has already been translated into Chinese as part of a wiki . Many bloggers from the People's Republic of China and Taiwan worked together.

expenditure

Remarks

  1. a b Mahoney p. 2314
  2. a b Mahoney p. 2306
  3. Lawrence Lessig in: Hilary W. Poole et al. (Ed.): The Internet: a historical encyclopedia, Volume 1 ABC-CLIO, 2005 ISBN 1851096590 p. 152
  4. Colin Lankshear, Michele Knobel: Digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices , Peter Lang, 2008 ISBN 1433101696
  5. Lawrence Lessig in: Hilary W. Poole et al. (Ed.): The Internet: a historical encyclopedia, Volume 1 ABC-CLIO, 2005 ISBN 1851096590 p. 153
  6. a b Mahoney p. 2310
  7. a b Mahoney p. 2311
  8. a b Mahoney p. 2313
  9. a b c Mahoney p. 2317
  10. David Grazian: Review: A Digital Revolution? A Reassessment of New Media and Cultural Production in the Digital Age in: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 597, (Jan., 2005), p. 218
  11. ^ Mahoney p. 2322
  12. a b Mahoney p. 2327
  13. David Grazian: Review: A Digital Revolution? A Reassessment of New Media and Cultural Production in the Digital Age. In: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 597 (January 2005), p. 218.
  14. ^ Mahoney p. 2320
  15. a b Marcus Boon: In Praise of Copying Harvard University Press, 2010 ISBN 0674047834 p. 42
  16. ^ Mahoney p. 2326
  17. a b Mahoney p. 2329
  18. ^ Mahoney p. 2331
  19. a b Mahoney p. 2307
  20. David Grazian: Review: A Digital Revolution? A Reassessment of New Media and Cultural Production in the Digital Age in: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 597, (Jan., 2005), p. 222

literature

  • Julia D. Mahoney: Review: Lawrence Lessig's Dystopian Vision Virginia Law Review Vol. 90, No. 8 (Dec., 2004), pp. 2305-2333

Web links

German:

English: