Free Culture

I have to admit, I was not thrilled to read 60 pages of a book for English class on top of every other commitment I have had this week. However, upon reading the first four chapters of Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture-The Nature and Future of Creativity" I learned to think outside of the box about authorship.

I have always considered music, television, paintings and other forms of "creativity" to be authorship, and this book gives solid reasons to continue to think this way. I really enjoyed reading factual concepts such as the dates that Disney created Mickey Mouse and the date that the radio stations were created; however I lack understanding for almost all things political. In every day life, politics bore me to death, and while I do have opinions on certain issues, I never really become interested in the hows and whys of systems or politics. Much of these first four chapters, while the examples were interesting, did express some political situations I am not familiar with.

For example, one of the main concepts addressed was piracy. Lawrence describes piracy as taking something of value to someone else and use it as your own without permission (Lessig 18). This sounds simple, right? Wrong, or at least for me. As I continued reading I found myself getting lost in the explanations as to why an instance was or wasn't a case of piracy. As I mentioned, I am not a big "think of the box" person when it comes to things such as this, but I do try. (Of course my way of trying consisted of looking to see if other posted on their blog about the subject to see if I could gain a better grasp on the material-unfortunately for me, Andy seems to know what he is talking about too well for me to understand as well, haha.)

Perhaps the reason I never think about these politics, or in this case the hows and whys of authorship and piracy is because of the last point Lessig makes in Chapter 4: "Every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy" (Lessig 61). If you think about it, there is nothing false about this statement...even if something seems origional, there was probably an outside influence somewhere on this idea. I am not saying that ll creativity is dead, but Lessig says,"The key to success is the brilliance of the differences" (Lessig 23).