Free Culture : The Nature and Future of Creativity

Lawrence Lessig, the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He has clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. The author of The Future of Ideas and Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace.