Free Culture (book)
Free Culture - How Big Media companies, the technology and the right to exploit to lock away the culture and control creativity, is a book of the law professor at Harvard Law School Lawrence Lessig in 2004 was on the internet at March 25, 2004. the Creative Commons license cc-by -nc 1.0 released. The printed edition of the book was published by Penguin Books under full copyright protection. The original English title is: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. In German language, the book entitled Free Culture, Nature and Future of Creativity has appeared in print in January 2006 with Open Source Press.
"There was never before in history, a time when more of our " culture " in " property " than now. And as never was before, the concentration of power in controlling the use of culture as unangezweifelt accepted as it is today. "
Background
Lessig is one of a number of books and essays that expressed concerns about the future of copyright law and its effects on culture and technology around the turn of the millennium.
Position in the work
Free Culture is the third of the previous four books in which the constitutionalists with questions of copyright, freedom, culture and Internet addresses. In code, it shows how the infrastructure of the Internet can also be used to control existing in the future of ideas such as political and social efforts to limit the power of innovation and freedom of the Internet. In the book " Free Culture ", he goes a step further and notes that the entire environment of creativity is threatened by the changing intellectual property laws, changes in technology and the increasing concentration of media.
The basic ideas of the book presented Lessig first time in the keynote at OSCON 2002, and in January 2008 he announced that he would hold his last lecture primarily on issues of free culture, and to devote himself to the corruption in Washington and attacked American democracy. It builds on Lessig's work in Eldred v. Ashcroft process, in which he tried in vain to attack the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998, which significantly prolonged the American copyright protection. The decision was thus in a number of other court decisions, such as Napster or DeCSS, which always favored the owner of Urheberrrechten against their users.
Content
History of copyright and current developments
Lessig draws a history of American copyright in the field of tension between author and consumer interests after. According to Lessig, succeeded the right balance between the two interests to protect, and adapt to technical changes. In recent years, however, the legal system is out of control. Here, Lessig is mainly concerned with copyright, but assumes that similar developments also exist in other areas of intellectual property rights.
Lessig analyzes the tension between the concepts of Schwarzkopiererei ( piracy ) and property in the field of intellectual property. He sees threats by three factors: an increasingly concentrated media landscape that can exert influence on the policy, changes in the underlying technology, which allow extensive control, and changes in the laws, which were solely for the benefit of the media conglomerates. While copyright in the U.S. was once limited to 14 years and only direct reproductions prohibited, the law has been progressively extended in time, and grasp now numerous kinds of copying, editing, transformation. Far from protecting the actual work, blanket Copyright meanwhile from individual ideas or aspects.
The technical developments of recent decades make it possible simultaneously to monitor the use and appropriation of works by previously unknown thoroughness, while the control costs drop dramatically. The new possibilities of editing and creative appropriation offered by these techniques also are threatened by developments in law and business. While it is possible under certain circumstances to seek the permission of the rights holders, but this is usually cumbersome and costly. A " permission culture" is the opposite of a "free culture. "
In the last 20 years there has been an unprecedented According to Lessig process of concentration in the media. The interests of the media industry consists mainly in the accumulation of capital and less in the free exchange of ideas. The products that produce this economy, are sterile, safe and homogeneous. At the same time they used the impaired American legislative procedure to a form of corruption to enforce laws in their favor.
Eldred v. Ashcroft
The book traces his defense in the case Eldred v. Ashcroft gradually to bring his trial, a law which was referred to internally as the Eldred Act, to Congress. According to Lessig, this bill, depending on your perspective, as Public Domain Enhancement Act (Act to strengthen the common property ) or as Copyright Deregulation Act (Act on the deregulation of the copyright) would operate.
Copyright and Creativity
Example shows Lessig, such as art through the appropriation and reworking of the ideas of others arose. Here, even the big rights owners of today have all benefited in their respective development in one way or another way of foreign works. Lessig shows that every industry that occurs today in favor of strong copyright, benefited in their emergence from the limited legal protection of that time. Lessig opinion sets out the publishing houses, the movie industry, the photographic industry, the radio and the cable companies. In some cases they used plants that were still free under the conditions of that time, or they went to law by a lack of law enforcement from. The portraits of Lessig appropriators were sued in these cases mostly, but the rights had already expired when the effective prosecution was set in motion, or the legislature sought a balance that did not eliminate the new in favor of the old.
The stories from the early days of the media industry provides Lessig current developments contrary, in which he describes the painstaking process of creating something creative today, and in which intellectual property rights to the creative process either prevented or massively disabled. He cites the example here, a CD-ROM on the life's work of Clint Eastwood in which alone the procurement of the necessary rights of all directors, producers and actors took over a year. He also describes the attempt of the filmmaker Jon Else install a four- second clip from the Simpsons in a documentary about the making of a ring image of the San Francisco Opera. An attempt that ultimately failed because the license claims of rights holders Fox topped the budget, and the producer despite presumably existing rights exception would not provoke protracted dispute in court in the Copyright Act.
The establishment of the legal instrument of fair use referred to Lessig as largely ineffective. Rights holders would operate an aggressive policy of prosecution, so that the very legitimate uses WOULD CHOOSE litigation after, and many legitimate users would be deterred in advance. Many more users creative works insist that all rights "cleared", are thus used with permission of the owner, even if it is clear fair use uses. The attack on Peer2Peer file sharing Lessig compares with the use of DDT for crop protection. Actions against the file-sharing would be helpful against an evil, but would simultaneously destroy filesharing the entire creative ecosystem that these generate.
Political consequences
In addition to the impact on culture Lessig sees consequences for the political system of the United States. It is for the health of a democratic system is essential to be able to draw on existing culture, to broaden it, to comment, to change it and create something new out of it. Legal and technical development together compromising the ability to access one's own culture. Ultimately, are social practices that are required for the functioning of a democracy in danger.
Proposals for action
Lessig sees the target of it as free culture permeated by a multitude of private property rights. He advocates market and the commercial exploitation of intellectual creations. Nevertheless, these rights if they are used incorrectly, culture threaten and restrict. In the epilogue to his book, he made proposals, such as the risk for a Free Culture can be averted. But he agrees with the proposals into two categories: proposals that can implement any immediate, and proposals that require action by the legislature required.
For individuals Lessig suggests that this innovative concepts should use to distribute content. For example, by the use of Creative Commons licenses. The proposed by the pioneer of free software, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation model to make content available for free, is not in contradiction to business models such as those of Westlaw and LexisNexis. They receive money from subscribers for the provision of the common property ( Public Domain ) related content, showing controlled use licenses that have been created by Lessig's Creative Commons organization. Likewise, they should be politically involved for free content or more privacy.
At the legislative level to Lessig uses a formally complicated way of obtaining copyrights. This would require, among others, clearly, who owns the rights to a work, and from whom you can obtain this. Here he has in mind before another system as the necessary formalities which existed until 1976 in the American legal system. Lessig argues for the establishment of a shorter time period for copyright protection, which can optionally be prolonged if there interest with the least possible effort. He calls for a system like that in front of the average copyright was about 32 years before the law reform of 1976. He starts out from the fact that for about 94 % of the works already prevailing at the end of copyright protection, no commercial exploitation interests more, and it would be a big waste, pertinent to the public domain withhold. Also occurs Lessig for a limitation of copyright in terms of derived rights. He wants, for example, limit the possibility of a publishing house, to prevent the publication of copies of the book by an author on the Internet for non-commercial purposes. He also takes up the proposal by William W. Fisher of Harvard Law School to the effect that the government such as the radio, the licensing of intellectual property by law regulate ( compulsory license) should, and the respective creators then according to the download figures as percentage of revenue is involved.
Reception
The book received worldwide attention even outside the strict jurisprudential discussion. Lessig brought the concept of a " free culture " for the first time the wider sections of the population to be heard, and created for the movement itself certain principles and definitions on which they could define. In his " manifesto " he sparked the idea of open source from the field of software, and made him popular also for other plant species.
The contemporary scientific reception was rather skeptical. The law professor from Virginia, Julia D. Mahoney describes the book as a culmination of overheated rhetoric, the limit to the Apocalyptic. To support his thesis, a recently plummeting disaster, Lessig would ignore the many problems of copyright before 1976, while he interprets the latest developments on one side.
While Lessig proclaims the threat to culture, it is in fact especially the creative energies, and cultural freedom that could unleash the Internet. The individual cases and examples which he considers Lessig are well chosen and presented impressive illustrations of the complex relationship between human society and intellectual property rights dar. fact, are the facts which he describe more complex, richer, and more interesting than the one-dimensional theory, he infers from it.
The sociologist David Granzian also praises the description of the interaction between progress and development of law, and bring the ominous developments these with you. He also throws Lessig ago, however, to interpret his examples extreme and inadmissible to generalize too much. He would thus represent a similarly one-sided determinism, as the followers of the digital age.
Derivative works
Expenditure
- U.S. 1st hardcover edition: ISBN 1-59420-006-8
- DE 1st edition, hardcover: ISBN 3-937514-15-5