Shamelessly stealing from BoingBoing, mostly to test out my new favourite blogging program, w.bloggar. Also playing with the BlogThis extension to Mozilla FireFox.

Lessig's Free Culture, free online, under a Creative Commons license


Larry Lessig's new book "Free Culture"
-- which is about the value of freedom to cultural production -- is out
in stores today, and, unlike his previous two books, Larry has foudn
the leverage to convince his publisher to let him release the full text
of the new book online under a Creative Commons license...

A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of
America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus
is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the
past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and
technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas,
Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise
of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider
the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful
wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the
long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that
fosters innovation.

All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so
on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is
possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years,
laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and
allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original
term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years.
Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting
the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an
essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?

Link

(Thanks, Larry!)