Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

[jasondv]

I picked this up from Rohdesign. Lawrence Lesig has released Free Culture as a free e-book. It's been released under the CreativeCommons license,and multiple versions (e.g., iSilo, Plucker, MS Reader) are available for download. I'm only in the first few pages of the first chapter, but here are Mike Rohde's comments:

The book is a very nicely written argument that US copyright laws should not be treated like property laws — that owners of copyright should not be able to hold power over copyrights for eternity. Lessig suggests that releasing copyrighted things into the public domain after a reasonable time is key to culture staying creative by building on what has come before.