the future is Free Culture
On March 25, Penguin will be releasing my new book, Free Culture. (Hmm, you'd think a book by "Penguin" about "Free Culture" would be released ...). All reviews (both good (Jonathan Schwartz in the American Lawyer) and bad (Stephen Manes of Forbes)) will be collected on a soon to be announced site, along with totally objective reviews of at least some of the reviews provided by the author (me). I'll be doing a couple events around the book. The first is next Tuesday at the 92d Street Y in New York. The day the book goes on sale, I'll be debating James DeLong of the Progress and Freedom Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Stay tuned for more surprises.
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Comments (12)
So, is the book released under a Creative Commons license? Will electronic versions be available?
Stephen Manes is an elected member of the National Council of the Authors Guild, has written several books, and owns "dozens of copyrights." Somehow his favoring of a unbalanced copyright system and his oversimplistic views of copyright law fail to surprise me. Also, I notice that he forgot to mention his conflicts of interest in this book review.
I'm hoping that a transcript of the debate/talk will be provided at some point. I would very much like to hear (or read as the case may be) the discussion but am unable to make it to NYC.
-- Gerry Pocock, Ph.D.
Will the debate be webcast?
Also will you please talk to Lauren Gelman and get the CIS/SLATA lunch speakers posted on the web?
Please?
It's the only way people stuck in Tennessee are going to have exposure to discussions such as these.
While it is not possible to do live webcasts of our weekly lunch talks, audio from all the CIS/SLATA talks are available on our website. It usually takes our AV people about a weeks to get them to us.
The archived talks are here.
Will your new book be released at the same time throughout the world or only in US/Canada?
US first.
Seriously, though: what about the license? Will the book be available under a Creative Commons license of any kind? A "verbatim copying" license? Anything?
Are you still trying to figure this out with your publisher? Is it just not practicable in the current environment with major publishers? Do you have personal or philosophical reasons not to publish books you author under free-redistribution licenses?
I'm not trying to criticize either way. I'm just wondering.
I see Lauren has already answered this question, but video / audio of the debate would be extremely interesting. I trust you'll be posting a link to them when they're available professor?
In Mr. Manes's critique he compares Lessig's suggestions for change with, "abolishing real estate law to help out squatters."
I couldn't (dis)agree more.
Though I hate to mince words and confuse the differences between physical and intellectual property further, I cannot help but put forth an argument made by Hernando DeSoto in The Mystery of Capital ( Chapter 1 ).
To DeSoto's mind, giving property rights to 'squatters' has the ability to, "extract capital where others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential that is locked up in the assets we accumulate". It gets to the heart of the promise held within a remix culture (the Grey Album comes to mind).
When costs, be they land or licensing, become too high, the 'bandetti' extract value through cracks in the system. Reforming the laws to acknowledge the reality of the present makes law abiding citizens of the once illicit and benefits society on the whole.
From DeSoto's Chapter 1:
"Do squatters, bandits, and flagrant disregard of the law sound familiar? Americans and Europeans have been telling the other countries of the world, "You have to be more like us." In fact, they are very much like the United States of a century ago when it too was a Third World country."
Sounds a lot like the current state of IP affairs to me. Manes's ridicule makes a strong point for the subject of his derision.
Thursday's luncheon debate at the National Press Club is already over-subscribed, according to Brooke Emmerick, who runs special events for the PFF foundation which DeLong heads. I'm waitlisted. I've asked her to call me if any broadcast or webcast of the debate is to become available, and if so I'll post the info here.
Len