Free Culture book signing

Yesterday I spent the day at Stanford's Law School talking to the Creative Commons and also attending Larry Lessig's book signing event for his latest book Free Culture. (Amazon: Free Culture).

In his speech at the event, Larry had the usual array of slides in the classic Lessig "strong words, white on black" style. He eloquently argued the premise of his new book: "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity". In a sense it felt like Larry was preaching to the choir -- everyone present for the event was either associated with Larry, Stanford Law or the Creative Commons. And these people are not exactly new to the issues that he raises in his book.

Regardless, Larry had quite a few interesting things to say about the effects of releasing his book under a Creative Commons license. If I had been more prepared, I would've taken some notes -- alas, I was not and I'll try and paraphrase his chronicles of the book release:

• Immediately after the release tens of thousands of people download the book.
• Shortly thereafter, the Internet community converts the book into 9 seperate formats ranging from text to various eBook formats.
• Then, a rag-tag crew of volunteers read chapters of the book out loud to create the Free Culture audiobook.
• Lastly, Aaron Swartz created a Free Cultire Wiki for annotating and editing Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture.

While I can't remember the exact times when these events happened, I believe they all happened within 72 hours of the release.

The beauty of all of this is that the premise in the book states that when copyright holders lock down every conceivable right they own, they are stifling innovation. And by Larry releasing his book under the Creative Commons license, he makes the perfect example that freeing your content (some rights reserved) does foster innovation.

Compare the buzz surrounding Larry's latest book with his previous two books, which were not released under the Creative Commons license. The buzz for this book is crazy compared to the previous two releases -- by using the Creative Commons license Larry has indirectly created a whole army of people who are helping him push this book.

Smart. Very smart.

Before I drove home, I dumped the audiobook to my iPod and listened to the first couple of chapters on the way home. Free Culture -- the book and the ability for me to listen to the audiobook without fear of ending up in jail -- is quite cool. Let's work to protect it, shall we?

Robert Kaye is the Mayhem & Chaos Coordinator and creator of MusicBrainz, the music metadata commons.

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