Free Culture in a Thrift Store

There are frequently stories about someone who found a great treasure in a thrift shop or pawn shop like maybe a rare pre-war Martin D-28 or some other cool thing.  Finally, I can join the ranks of the thrift shop story tellers, only my find was not a guitar or piece of jewelry, but rather the game changing treatise of professor Lawrence Lessig, “Free Culture“!  For any of you who have followed my blog posts here, you will know that Lawrence Lessig and his brain child, “Creative Commons” have been a huge interest and excitement for me personally.  In fact, it was Jonathon Coulton’s work that first turned me on to this whole idea that I don’t need to be afraid to share my music with the world. There is a cool middle option between the totally restrictive, conventional copyright “ALL rights reserved” approach and total anarchy – The middle, cool option is called Creative Commons.

Now, I can begin as I should have and actually read Free Culture cover to cover rather than in bits and pieces on the internet.  The internet is wonderful for many things, but don’t you sometimes like to sit down in a chair with an old fashioned book?  Now I will.  Now I will reread the telling of the tale of how Walt Disney was one of the all time greats of “creative borrowing”, and used this carrying forward of culture to create new and more exciting culture, but now they along with others like RIAA, attempt to control everything and change us from a “free culture” to a “permission culture”.  As you can tell, I love this book and the Creative Commons movement.  Sadly, whoever owned this book before me appears to have never even read it…it looked like the cover had never been opened.  I have changed all that.  Alright, back to my book.  What are you doing tonight?