If you're anything like me, at this point of the class you probably know how much you don't know about copyright, fair use, Creative Commons, and the grand media conspiracy to get government to legislate protections for the music industry. I never realized it was so complicated, and the very fact that it is so convoluted is a telling sign that something's not right.
Lessig summarizes his project by claiming a middle ground between "all right reserved" and "no rights reserved" with "some rights reserved" in the guise of the Creative Commons, where individuals can decide how much other people can use their creations. Presumably, if you come across a CC license, the creator of that work is giving you some permission to use that work/tool under certain restrictions. Will this lessen piracy and theft? Not knowing any better, the first time I came across a CC license I thought "Whoa. Hold on there. I don't want to get too close to this thing. I'd better back up nice and slow and everything will be okay." Rather than looking into the license, I thought it was copyright on crack, and I probed no further.
The hope is that by using CC, more work will be available for public consumption and the greater culture will flourish. Individuals will no longer have to "borrow" from corporations/institutions. However, don't forget that corporations "borrow" from individuals as well, as the case of the Chinese Olympic website stealing a game from a graphic designer without asking permission or offering compensation. Would this example had been averted if a CC license were present? Will people steal regardless of the restrictions? I don't know.
So we get to the end of Free Culture when we realize that the problem is alot bigger than we thought. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. What do we do? Take to the streets? Riot? Refuse to buy music? Join a cutting-edge p2p group? Ignore it? Lessig actually endorses this last option in regards to cracking down on illegal downloads when he says the ubiquity and speed of the Internet will soon make p2p file sharing obsolete; why be a content manager when it's easier to just subscribe to a service to listen to whatever you want? Though not exactly the same, Apple has been toying with a similar scenario by allowing new iPod owners to get unlimited lifetime use of iTunes for a one-time fee. Is this the future, all Internet, all the time? Abilene Christian University, that bastion of conservatism, recently announced that they're giving all incoming freshmen free iPhones. Is this the end or just the beginning?
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Although we were not required to read Lessig's mea culpa concerning the case he lost before the Supreme Court, it does influence the latter portion of his book. His failure to convince the judges that there was an urgent political as well as cultural need to restrict copyright use led to their decision in favor of the entrenched interests, which he has successfully argued stand in the way of technological advancement.
The significant point is that most Americans have no idea how copyright can be used to impede progress; most Americans hold the rigid belief in property that characterizes physical property and not intellectual property; and most Americans still believe they live in a functioning democracy, and that free market means fair market.
What Lessig suggests, even if not directly, is that Americans need to be educated about intellectual property before any legitimate case can be made to alter copyright and promote fair use.
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