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Thanks to the lessons explained by others (Cory), and the courage of a great publisher (Penguin), Free Culture launches today with a free online version of the book, licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can get the book here, though at the moment, only the bittorrent version is apparently up. Later today, there will be a direct download available from the Free Culture site, and from the Amazon site.
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Lessig Blog by Lawrence Lessig is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Comments (19)
Has anyone created alternate format versions of the book yet? One of the great things about Cory's books is how many formats you can download them in, to suit whatever environment you want to read them in.
Versions of this book suitable for mobile devices would be most handy
The link to the PDF version is 404. Did the publisher get cold feet? =^)
Okay, I just had to mention this. The subtitle to "Free Culture" is "How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity." However, the freely downloadable version is a PDF. Does anybody else find this ironical? Was this intentional?
Very cool! Thanks!
I was hoping you would do this. Any chance of your old books being released under a creative commons license as well?
Congratulations!
We'll be purchasing Free Culture!
If you have a magnet-enabled P2P client installed (i.e. LimeWire) you can also get it here.
However, the freely downloadable version is a PDF. Does anybody else find this ironical?
Did you even glance at the license? Or does putting "This PDF version" before the license exploit some loophole I'm unaware of?
freeculture.txt
(Not optimized for anything, it's just a save of the PDF)
Blogged your download (and your no 2 rank on Technorati's most linked to books), after which John Morse noted this in comments:
Hm. The 2nd page of the PDF tells us about the lovely Creative Commons license, and then the copyright page (7 on the PDF) says "All Rights Reserved" and has a longish bit about not reproducing, storing, introducing into a retrieval system, transmitting, in any form or by any means without written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher and that scanning, uploading, and distributing the book via the internet or any other means without permission is illegal and punishable by law. Penguin encourages you to support the author's rights.
Any thoughts? It's in the version I just downloaded. Tx
What's the problem? It says you cannot do these things without "without written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher." We have this written permission in the form of the CC license.
You and I may know that the CC license stands, but if people send the pdf around with the "all rights reserved" language, it will get disconnected from the CC language where blogs including this one have linked the two together. If someone wanted to copy it for a class, they may think their behavior is not allowed even though it is according to the CC license. If they buy the book, my understanding is that the CC license still stands (though it's not yet in the CC database so I can't find the dated listing linking book and license). A hard copy owner or borrower won't likely see the new license, and yet the All Rights Reserved conflicts with the message of the book. Part of the value of the CC licensing program is that these things are connected in human and machine language, and I think it makes sense to change it in the pdf and bitorrent versions so that it's correct for those that don't know about this stuff. Plus it promotes CC more. I really think it's worth doing to get the complete message out there.
to Curtis: PDF is an open-standard, it may be Adobe's, but it is open... here's the spec.
I'd also be interested in Larry's response to Mary's query (say that ten times).
This is great to hear....it's actually the question I wanted to ask the other day when you appeared on Talk of The Nation.
Nick Burch brought up a good point though... Cory's works are available in a wonderful variety of formats. Additionally they are available all in one location, which makes findnig the different formats very easy. The CC license allows for derivative works, so we're certainly free to make new formatted versions (time to break out Acrobat and Metapad for some html editing), but having an area available to add new versions on the main site would be most helpful to others looking for different formats.
I just want to say thank you for making it available not only as a direct download but as a .torrent as well. It was the impetus I've needed to check out this technology, and I've already shared nearly six times the bandwidth I used in downloading it this aftenroon. I'm going to leave it up all night as well.
Here's a quick version of Free Culture in html. It is somewhat lacking in the sense that it is a fairly straight copy of the pdf, but it is at least readable (I am at page 147 as I write) and most of the formating is intact. More work certainly needs to be done for a quality conversion.
Hm. The book says in it:
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
I am rather close to removing the html version from the internet that I uploaded earlier.
I somehow ended up forgoing studying for midterms today in favor of reading this--much enjoyed this really terrific work. Thanks so much for both your work on the issue and for providing it with the CC licence!
Josh: The PDF version from which you created your HTML is, because of the CC license, an "authorized electronic edition" and, because of the sharing provisions of same license, not "electronic piracy". Had you scanned a print copy and made that available on the net, it might be a different story.
I'm sure this is just Penguin's standard rights language, but if you think about it, there's good reason (from their point of view, and even from the Prof's) to insist on it.
This whole method of distribution is very much an experiment, remember. Based on the numbers from the Legal Torrents tracker and the direct download numbers at the free-culture.org host, everyone will have a fairly good idea of how many copies of the PDF have been distributed. If people were to digitize the hardcover and pass that around, though, it would essentially wreck the control group.
Joe: No, PDF is not "an open standard." It is published and the specs are currently available online, but Adobe has full control over it and can change it at any time and make the specs unavailable.
I wasn't necessarily criticizing the use of PDF -- a lot of people use it, and that's great. I just thought it was ironic that a book on "Free Culture" was made available only in a proprietary format created by a company known (and exampled in said book) to use the law to stifle innovation. I actually wondered if perhaps the use of PDF had been something of a wry joke. Apparently, though, it wasn't.
srrr