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Copyrights and Wrongs: Damming the Flow of 'Free' Information
Book Review: FREE CULTURE
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig stalks these and other mysteries of U.S. copyright enforcement in "Free Culture," a more judicial-minded sequel to his earlier book "The Future of Ideas." Lessig is one of the leading academic critics of our copyright regime, and since he has advised or represented a good number of the individuals and online enterprises that have run afoul of it, he has a strong firsthand knowledge of the damage that over-vigilant copyrighting can do.
"Free Culture" presents a sobering list of indictments. Even before the recording industry went on its present prosecution binge, bigfoot proprietors of intellectual property were targeting the reproduction-happy new technologies of the Internet world for often absurd control initiatives. Adobe, the software company that licenses many e-book titles, infamously instructed users of its version of "Alice in Wonderland" -- a book that has long passed into the public domain -- that the book was under no circumstances to be "read aloud" (doubtless a clumsy misstatement of the licensing proviso that the software was not to be used on audio computer programs). And even though Lessig champions the freest possible use of copyrighted materials, the e-book version of his own "The Future of Ideas" instructs users that the text is not to be copied, printed or read in recorded form over the computer.

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