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''Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity'' (published in paperback as ''Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity'') is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license ((by-nc 1.0 )) on March 25, 2004. This book documents how copyright power has expanded substantially since 1974 in five critical dimensions: *duration (from 32 to 95 years), *scope (from publishers to virtually everyone), *reach (to every view on a computer), *control (including "derivative works" defined so broadly that virtually any new content could be sued by some copyright holder as a "derivative work" of something), and *concentration and integration of the media industry. It also documents how this industry has successfully used the legal system to limit competition to the major media corporations through legal action against: * College students for close to $100 ''billion'', because their improvements of search engines made it easier for people in a ''university intranet'' to find copyrighted music placed by others in their "public" folder. * Lawyers who advised MP3.com that they had reasonable grounds to believe streaming an MP3 uploaded by a customer only to computers that the customer has logged-in on for the service is legal, and * Venture Capitalists who funded Napster. The result is a legal and economic environment that stifles "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", exactly the opposite of the purpose cited in the US Constitution. It may not be possible today to produce another Mickey Mouse, because many of its early cartoon themes might be considered "derivative works" of some existing copyrighted material (as indicated in the subtitle to the hardback edition and in numerous examples in this book). == Summary == This book is an outgrowth of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in ''Eldred v. Ashcroft'', which Lessig lost. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution says, "The Congress shall have Power... to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Several times in the past century, congress has extended the copyright law in several ways. One way was to extend the term "on the installment plan".〔Lessig 2004, p. 162.〕 Another was to broaden the scope to include not only copying but creating "derivative works". This latter broadening is so ambiguous that it provides a foundation for massive abuse of power by companies holding large copyright portfolios. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America sued a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for $10,000,000 for improving a search engine used only inside RPI.〔Lessig 2004, ch. 3.〕 Lessig cites another example where Fox demanded $10,000 for the rights to use a 4.5 second video clip with ''The Simpsons'' playing on a television in a corner of a scene in a documentary.〔Lessig 2004, ch. 7.〕 Anyone producing a collage of video clips can potentially be similarly sued on the grounds the collage is a "derivative work" of something copyrighted or that the collage contains a shot that is copyrighted. Lessig argues that this substantially limits the growth of creative arts and culture, in violation of the US Constitution; the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the constitutional authority to properly balance competing interests on cases like this. In the preface of ''Free Culture'', Lessig compares this book with a previous book of his, ''Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'', which propounded that software has the effect of law. ''Free Culture'' Professor Lessig analyzes the tension that exists between the concepts of piracy and property in the intellectual property realm in the context of what he calls the present "depressingly compromised process of making law" that has been captured in most nations by multinational corporations that are interested in the accumulation of capital and not the free exchange of ideas. The book also chronicles his prosecution of ''Eldred'' and his attempt to develop the Eldred Act, also known as the ''Public Domain Enhancement Act'' or the ''Copyright Deregulation Act''. Lessig concludes his book by suggesting that as society evolves into an information society there is a choice to be made to decide if that society is to be free or feudal in nature. In his afterword he suggests that free software pioneer Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation model of making content available is not against the capitalist approach that has allowed such corporate models as Westlaw and LexisNexis to have subscribers to pay for materials that are essentially in the public domain but with underlying licenses like those created by his organization ''Creative Commons.'' He also argues for the creation of shorter renewable periods of copyright and a limitation on derivative rights, such as limiting a publisher's ability to stop the publication of copies of an author's book on the internet for non-commercial purposes or create a compulsory licensing scheme to ensure that creators obtain direct royalties for their works based upon their usage statistics and some kind of taxation scheme such as suggested by professor William Fisher of Harvard Law School〔http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/PTKChapter6.pdf〕 that is similar to a longstanding proposal of Richard Stallman. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Free Culture (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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