Free Culture | LESSIG

As the regime governing intellectual property rights evolved and began disproportionately favoring IP rights owners, the concept of openness became a tool for challenging power relations and striving for more equality. In that sense, the promotion of reuse and access to informational resources was fully compatible with the need to defend human righ... See more

As Larry Summers and J. Bradford DeLong would write in August 2001, just a month after the file-sharing service Napster was taken down, ‘the most basic condition for economic efficiency … [is] that price equal marginal cost.’ They went on: ‘with information goods, the social and marginal cost of distribution is close to zero.’ This held true not on

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Creative works are social objects in the fullest sense — they exist in a nexus of social, cultural, and legal links to other people and things, and they are only valuable to the extent they can fully participate in their whole context. Rights regimes restrict known rights, but also create rights if they are well designed, driving generativity.

Each wave of openness – universal franchise, free speech, the movement for an open web, open access content – helps to solve one set of problems and immediately focuses attention on others,