Reddit reviews Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig.

Lawrence Lessig is another good one...

His books Free Culture, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy are all excellent books on the subject.

http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-16.html

There is a lot of books on this topic.

EDIT: here's a couple good ones:

Free Culture

Here Comes Everybody

or anything by Noam Chomsky or Robert W. McChesney

I believe that sums up Lawrence Lessig's argument for the past decade.

I recommend Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture" for information on the crazy copyright situation in the US today. It was very enlightening for me. Spoiler alert: Big Media doesn't actually care about content creators. Gasp!

I'd suggest reading http://www.amazon.com/Free-Culture-Nature-Future-Creativity/dp/0143034650.

Free Culture On Amazon

Free Culture Official Page

The Future of Ideas on Amazon

The Future of Ideas Official Page

Code on Amazon

Code Official Page

Standard... publisher... copyright pages? Written permission... given in the book... AND on the official websites? No, surely these things cannot be so!

Well, the whole merits of IP and how we treat IP today is a slightly different conversation.

The real conversation in regards to the original topic is the fact that the way we regard IP is very different than how we did, 50-100 years ago. Let alone the way it was handled by enlightenment thinkers and the creators of the world's first democracies and republics.

Quite frankly, the incentive that would have been in their minds (and people like Smith), would have been that people would be able to extract a certain amount of money out of their creations (purely by being the first people to do it) and that eventually the knowledge would be released in some way to an intellectual "commons".

The history of these ideas and how they've changed is really interesting, but maybe a bit much to relay here. Some really good books on the subject:

The Anarchist in the Library

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

Essentially, for most of society there has been a concept of "the commons". Public spaces that everyone was entitled to use. The (earliest? not sure) most popular manifestation of this was common ground for grazing livestock. It was public land that anyone could bring their animals to, and was regarded as a public service that was in the best interest of the society. It eased pressure on land disputes, let poorer farmers stay above water, etc. Simply, just a good thing for everyone involved. Of course, since it was essentially free animal food, there were instances where the commons were worn down and rendered useless. This is where the phrase "tragedy of the commons" comes from. Regulations were put in place to make the commons effective for the common good, but also sustainable.

These types of initiatives/societal mechanisms were thought by enlightenment thinkers as necessary for our advancement. And those types of things were included in the way they thought about IP, as well. Simply put, it looks much different now than it did then. Things like "The Mickey Mouse Preservation act", for better or worse, made those changes.

So, what someone like Smith would say, is that there is "common good" that comes from free IP. The idea that no one has the patent on the concept of a car is a good thing because it frees up capital for different car companies to compete and make the best car. The individual loss of intellectual "ownership", and whatever that might mean on a broader societal scale, is outweighed by the benefits of "the commons".

But Smith had no concept of "ripping a movie". None of these enlightenment thinkers had any idea of what technology would become, and how that would fundamentally alter the way their theories actually played out in the real world. And since they didn't "cover that", we are left to be the philosophers and thinkers of our time instead of relying on the big ideas of the 1700s. In light of digital technology, the capability to replicate things, the transmit them almost instantaneously all over the world, putting the means of media production into the hands of every man woman and child in an effectively affordable manner... how do we need to build our society? How can we maintain incentive? What is the role of the commons? What are the real ramifications of our decisions? What do we want to achieve, and why?

It's all very interesting to me.

For those interested, Lawrence Lessig wrote a fabulous book on this topic.