Free Culture book signing
Robert Kaye
O'Reilly Developer Weblogs
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/4702
Apr. 14, 2004 03:50 PM


Yesterday I spent the day at Stanford's Law School talking to the Creative
Commons and also attending Larry Lessig's book signing event for his
latest book Free Culture. (Amazon: Free Culture).

In his speech at the event, Larry had the usual array of slides in the
classic Lessig "strong words, white on black" style. He eloquently argued
the premise of his new book: "How big media uses technology and the law to
lock down culture and control creativity". In a sense it felt like Larry
was preaching to the choir – everyone present for the event was either
associated with Larry, Stanford Law or the Creative Commons. And these
people are not exactly new to the issues that he raises in his book.

Regardless, Larry had quite a few interesting things to say about the
effects of releasing his book under a Creative Commons license. If I had
been more prepared, I would've taken some notes – alas, I was not and
I'll try and paraphrase his chronicles of the book release:

* Immediately after the release tens of thousands of people download
the book.
* Shortly thereafter, the Internet community converts the book into 9
seperate formats ranging from text to various eBook formats.
* Then, a rag-tag crew of volunteers read chapters of the book out
loud to create the Free Culture audiobook.
* Lastly, Aaron Swartz created a Free Cultire Wiki for annotating and
editing Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture.

While I can't remember the exact times when these events happened, I
believe they all happened within 72 hours of the release.

The beauty of all of this is that the premise in the book states that when
copyright holders lock down every conceivable right they own, they are
stifling innovation. And by Larry releasing his book under the Creative
Commons license, he makes the perfect example that freeing your content
(some rights reserved) does foster innovation.

Compare the buzz surrounding Larry's latest book with his previous two
books, which were not released under the Creative Commons license. The
buzz for this book is crazy compared to the previous two releases – by
using the Creative Commons license Larry has indirectly created a whole
army of people who are helping him push this book.

Smart. Very smart.

Before I drove home, I dumped the audiobook to my iPod and listened to the
first couple of chapters on the way home. Free Culture – the book and the
ability for me to listen to the audiobook without fear of ending up in
jail – is quite cool. Let's work to protect it, shall we?

[ Robert Kaye is the Mayhem & Chaos Coordinator and creator of
MusicBrainz, the music metadata commons. ]