For the Love of Culture (The New Republic)

Here is a lengthy article by Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic. It's mostly concerned with copyright as it relates to books and films, but it's not hard to see implications for free software as well. "And this requires progress in how we think about copyright. It requires giving up the idea that the elements in a compiled work--the music in a film, for example--have a continuing power to block access to, or distribution of, that work. Once a work is made, rather, we need to recognize that it has its own claim within our culture. And so long as the necessary permissions to make the work were secured originally, then at some point in the future (again, say fourteen years after its creation), the parts lose the power to control the whole."

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