Lessig discusses laws that inhibit creativity

I imagine most of you readers already know quite a bit about our friend Lawrence Lessig; Harvard law professor, founder of the Creative Commons movement, and outspoken expert on copyright law and its relation to technology.

If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you check out his book Free Culture, which was released under a Creative Commons license and is therefore free to download.

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman’s arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.

To get a brief summary of some of his ideas, watch this TED talk he gave a few years back (below the fold).

And for a more in-depth discussion, watch this Authors@Google lecture:

This won’t be the last time you see Mr. Lessig mentioned on this blog. He’s a very important figure in this debate, and many of his arguments are very persuasive and insightful.

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