Open License Computer Books

For more than a decade, we"ve been waging a war on our kids in the name of the 20th Century's model of "copyright law." In this, the last of his books about copyright, Lawrence Lessig maps both a way back to the 19th century, and to the promise of the 21st. Our past teaches us about the value in "remix." We need to relearn the lesson. The present teaches us about the potential in a new "hybrid economy" — one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies. That future will benefit both commerce and community.

Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" was published in 1999. The book quickly began to define a certain vocabulary for thinking about the regulation of cyberspace. More than any other social space, cyberspace would be controlled or not depending upon the architecture, or "code," of that space. And that meant regulators, and those seeking to protect cyberspace from at least some forms of regulation, needed to focus not just upon the work of legislators, but also the work of technologists.

Code v2 updates the original work. It is not, as Lessig writes in the preface, a "new work." Written in part collectively, through a Wiki hosted by JotSpot, the aim of the update was to recast the argument in the current context, and to clarify the argument where necessary.

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.