Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity / Lawrence Lessig.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-330) and index.

Creators -- "Mere copyists" -- Catalogs -- "Pirates" -- "Piracy" -- Founders -- Recorders -- Transformers -- Collectors -- "Property" -- Chimera -- Harms -- Eldred -- Eldred II -- Us, now -- Them, soon.

Lawrence Lessig, "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), is often called our leading cultural environmentalist. His focus is the ecosystem of creativity, the environment created around it by technology and law. To read Free Culture is to understand that the health of that ecosystem is in grave peril. While new technologies always lead to new laws, Lessig shows that never before have the big cultural monopolists drummed up such unease about these advances, especially the Internet, to shrink the public domain while using the same advances to control what we can and can't do with the culture all around us. What's at stake is our freedom -- freedom to create, freedom to build, and, ultimately, freedom to imagine.