Free (your) Culture

I've started reading Free Culture, by the great Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, and have already decided that this material shouldn't just be read by everyone but it should be part of a mandatory course taught to all high school students. I haven't decided what to call it but it should include all the topics that are key to maximizing personal freedom -- basically, to see that you're being ripped off and how to stand up for your rights. Things like understanding the importance of civics, freedoms (as in 1st Amendment), right to privacy, protecting our secular democracy, balance of power, stopping the corporate rip-off of the public for private gain.

This is becoming more and more important as various powerful factions are gutting our freedom for the sake of profit and control -- from the government removing habeus corpus and politicizing the judicial branch to the multinational corporations that neuter our ability to get unfiltered news or even decimate the environment. An uninformed citizenry will not be able to sustain democracy. As it is, we are rapidly becoming a plutocracy.

So back to Free Culture, which I just started now that I finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy -- also recommended, by the way.

You can get your own Creative Commons copy of Free Culture in various formats including PDF, HTML and others. Here's a little blurb:

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig. Site for the book is here, Lessig's site is here. Lessig is the one who argued (unsuccessfully, alas!) the Eldred v. Ashcroft case before the US Supreme Court, the case being about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This book includes a detailed account about that in chapters 13 & 14, but in general is a great primer on all the things wrong with the system today, how it got there, and what we can do about it. Lessig walks the talk and puts his money where his mouth is: the book was published under a Creative Commons License.

Get it now, while it's still free -- and so is your culture, although less and less so!