Tim Samoff // Weblog (old)

May 25, 2004

Support Free Culture...

In preparation for Lawrence Lessig‘s upcoming lecture at LIFT (London Internation Festival of Theatre), fellow Creative Commons advocate and Free Culture AudioBook abettor, Suw Charman has written an amazing essay about Lessig’s groundbreaking book, Free Culture, and our experiences of recording the audio version.

From Charman’s essay:

Let’s say you’ve written a book. A big book. A book that is worth publishing.
Let’s say you’ve got a publisher for your book. A big publisher. A publisher that people have heard of.
What happens when you convince your publisher to give your book away, for free, to anyone who wants it? This isn’t about giving review copies to journalists, this is about converting the book into an electronic format and giving it away to the general public so that they don’t have to spend their hard-earned cash on buying a hardcopy for their hardwood bookshelf.
If you believed the RIAA and other proponents of draconian copyright legislation, what happens when there is a choice between a free (legal or otherwise) download and a bought physical product, people will choose the free version over the bought version. Thus, say the RIAA, each time the free version is downloaded a sale is lost and the creators (read: rights holders) lose out financially.
By this logic, giving away your book, even with the consent of your publisher, is a bad idea. Commercial suicide even. It’s not something that any sane author should do, surely?

Professor Lessig’s response:

...“for half a second, I had to convince myself once again that this was a great idea, because although we expected people to be willing to read a book on a computer, we hadn’t really thought about them listening to it on audio. It took half a second and then I thought that this was actually an extremely good way to get the message out – my publisher is eager to sell books, and in some sense I am too, but I am much more eager to get the message out as broadly as I can, so the spread of the audio version was exactly what I was hoping for.”

Oh, and, yes, I am quoted in there too.

I’ve written plenty on my own experiences with the Free Culture AudioBook project. It was a fun and fulfilling cause to be a part of.

And you can be a part of it too, by supporting the issues presented in Free Culture.

Again, from Lessig:

“The only way for this change to happen is if we start pushing for it. It’s not just creators who stand to lose out from the current copyright law, but consumers too. We might not all be creators, we might not all be affected by the inability to make derivative works, but we all suffer from the loss of those works. We all suffer from the inability to archive existing works, we all suffer from the way that old works that are no longer in circulation or have commercial value are kept out of the public domain.”

Go read Suw Charman’s essay and think about whether our current copyright laws affect you or not. If you feel like they do, take a few hours to read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and think about what you can do to help make a change.

Posted at 07:27 am

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