How Copyright Law Is Killing Our Culture

from the and-reasonable-solutions-get-ignored dept

Salon is running an excellent review of two new books concerning how control over intellectual property is harming our cultural creativity. The first is, of course, Larry Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (which is also available for free in a variety of formats including audio download as read by various net.celebrities and annotated wiki). This book, not surprisingly has been badly misunderstood already by some reviewers. However, it makes some very good points about the nature of creativity - and how so much of it depends on building off the works of others. Now, however, thanks to the efforts of some copyright holders trying to overly protect their works, that sort of creativity is stymied - even if it's the same creativity that was used to build them up in the first place. The other book is Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, which goes into much more detail about the importance of less rigid rules and regulations in promoting creative expression. Where the Salon article really shines (unfortunately...) is juxtaposing these two books with recent events that show how our politicians (with the backing of certain companies) are continuing to push in the other direction. Most tragic of all, is that even reasonable middle-ground solutions seem to have no place in the debate - where only extremes seem to get heard.