Lessig Review In New York Times Book Review

Got an advanced copy of the Lessig review by Adam Cohen of Free Culture. It will run in this Sunday's (April 4, 2004) New York Times. Not sure if it's online yet.

The shrinking of the public domain, and the devastation it threatens to the culture, are the subject of a powerfully argued and important analysis by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading member of a group of theorists and grass-roots activists, sometimes called the "copyleft," who have been crusading against the increasing expansion of copyright protections. Lessig was the chief lawyer in a noble, but ultimately unsuccessful, Supreme Court challenge to the copyright extensions act. "Free Culture" is partly a final appeal to the court of public opinion and partly a call to arms. ...

To his credit, Lessig avoids the classic law professor's trap of writing about legal cases and doctrines as if no actual people were involved. He humanizes his arguments with stories like that of Jesse Jordan, a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who innocently put together a new search engine for his school's computer network, and, after students started using it to trade music, was notified by the Recording Industry Association of America that he owed them $15 million. (They settled for $12,000, his life savings.)

Lessig grounds his argument about the new rules' impact on the culture in a basic observation about art: as long as it has existed, artists have been refashioning old works into new ones. Greek and Roman myths were developed over centuries of retelling. Shakespeare's plays are brilliant reworkings of other playwrights' and historians' stories. Even Disney owes its classic cartoon archive -- Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio -- to its plundering of other creators' tales. And today, technology allows for the creation of ever more elaborate "derivative works,' art that builds on previous art, from hip-hop songs that insert, or sample, older songs to video art that adds new characters to, or otherwise alters, classic films."