Because (or despite the fact) it’s Passover tonight, I thought I’d post something liberation-relevant: Stanford Professor of Law and all things open technology Lawrence Lessig has made his new book “Free Culture” available for free [link goes directly to PDF] for a limited time on Amazon.com.
Granted this is a 352 page book but, from the excerpt below (from the preface), a potential reader might get the sense that this is an important book, a relevant and current take on the ownership of software, content, and the freedom to create and transmit ideas:
That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of ‘free culture’—not ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’ (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ ; ‘free markets,’ ‘free trade,’ ‘free enterprise,’ ‘free will,’ and ‘free elections.’ A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a ‘permission culture’—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
Happy Passover.