Book Review: Free Culture

Free Culture
By Lawrence Lessig

I enjoyed this book. In some ways it was similar to other books I have been reading lately with critiques of copyright and scary stories such as the documentary maker who had to jump through 1,000 hoops because a part of his documentary caught 5 seconds of Simpsons clip.

There is lots that could be said about this book, but since you can read Free Culture (for free) I’ll let you do the heavy lifting. I want to focus on two specific points that meant a lot to me from this book.

One thing that I have been thinking about is what happens to a book after it goes out of print, and what a shame it is that so much “good stuff” is gone from the common view of the world. Lessig says,

“Here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of creative property goes through different ‘lives.’ In its first life, if the [page 113] creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is successful for the creator. The vase majority of creative property doesn’t enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is extremely important. Without this commercial market, there would be, many argue, much less creativity.

“After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.

“The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is after about a year). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture” (112-113).

To put briefly, there is life after commercial use. Online technologies now allow the distribution of books and other culture to have a life outside of libraries and used book stores. Because it is now easy and cheap to share books and other media in this matter there is no reason why it should not be done. Just this past weekend I took a trip with Jack Marshall, author of several LDS talk CDs that are gone—out of print. These could easily preserved. But we need to act quickly. Lessig points out on pages 224 and 225 that some types of film will have disintegrated by the time they fall out of copyright—they aren’t being used right now, just there collecting dust. Continuing this train of thought:

“Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device….But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short…Yet that doesn’t mean the life of a creative work ends…The noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable—for entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we came from, and how we have made the mistake that we have, we need to have access to this history” (225).

The second point that was so helpful to me was that while Lessig refers to “Free Culture” not in “Free” as in “give it away” but that we should be free to access the culture. But what I got out of it was Free Culture as in “set culture free.” Find culture that is trapped and will otherwise not be able to be accessed and set it free. My humble efforts to set LDS book culture free has begun at http://freeldsbooks.com As time goes on, I hope it can become a force in connecting people with culture that otherwise would be missing. Just this past week my wife was talking about a church book that had been written in the 1950s. It was a book for kids telling inspiring pioneer stories. But it’s out of print, and there is no way to get a copy…Let’s set culture free.