Free the media.(Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity)(Book Review)

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig (Penguin, 368 pp., $24.95)

THE motion-picture and video industries employ over a quarter-million people and collect $55 billion in annual revenue. Book sales last year were $27 billion, based on 150,000 new titles and editions (up from 100,000 in 1992) and over 4 million books already in print. Also in 2003, the sound-recording industry shipped 798 million units with a value of $11.9 billion--down from the 1999 high of 1.16 billion units worth almost $14.6 billion, but still a big number, and one that does not include downloads for Apple's iPod or other legitimate services. One can drown in the oceans of data proving the vitality of America's creative spirit: Tens of thousands of people are working to carve a niche in the world of arts and entertainment, and millions of others are paying them for doing so. But in the new book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig tries to say it's an illusion. Lessig, however, likes stories rather than data, so such numbers would have little place in his book anyway.

The book itself is thin gruel, alternating between horror stories and polemical abstraction. It is more diluted than Code, the 1999 book that made Lessig a star in cyberland, and the 2001 follow-up The Future of Ideas. One suspects the familiar phenomenon that once a brand is established, the faithful will praise and buy, so quality becomes unnecessary. And this is a work for the faithful: It seems designed to promote Lessig's status as the gonfalonier of the Free Culture Movement, a loose alliance of academics and cyberites who have serious problems with current copyright laws. Their program--so far as one can determine, because its spokesmen, including Lessig, are elusive--is to shorten copyright terms, drastically circumscribe copyright protections against derivative works, widen concepts of "fair use" (and outlaw any method of digital encryption that would interfere with the expanded definition), and wipe out inhibitions on file sharing over the Internet (including lawsuits by offended copyright holders).

The ultimate goal of the Movement seems to be to cut the links between creative work and the market system. (Lessig declares himself a disciple of Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and a man who believes that the use of any proprietary software is immoral.) As to details, such as how the stuff will be produced if it is not protected and paid for, the Movement is coy. Their usual stance is that creative product should be free as in "free of the need to obtain permission before using it, modifying it, or redistributing it," not free in the sense of "free beer." Of course, they say, creators should be paid. This position is nonsense: If a creator has no power to stop redistribution, he has no power to collect payment. But taking this incoherent stance allows the Free Culture Movement to feign outrage at any suggestion that its advocates are against property rights.

Lessig's answer to the problem of financial support is to spend a page and a half on an idea floating around academia that the government should fund music by socializing it. "An appropriate tax" would be levied, and the pot divvied up according to the number of downloads of each item. This is a strange idea, full of practical problems; it would be even more difficult to apply to movies, software, games, or books, which will present the same Napsterization ...