 |
 |
 |
    |
 |
 |
 |
What's new. What's hot. What they're saying. |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
||
|
BOOKSHELF: Playback & Free Culture Mark Coleman's "Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines and Money" is a straightforward account of the history of the music industry from 1877 to the present. In a recent review in WIRED magazine, Brad King guesses that Coleman was trying to write a "'Hit Men' for the MP3 generation," a reference to Fredric Dannen's best-selling 1991 insider guide to Big Music. Coleman's result is "a primer for latecomers to the digital audio scene," spotting the major milestones and leading players but "failing to capture their characters." Gregory McNamee of the Hollywood Reporter find many simple but valuable lessons in the book (for example, "loud and easy trumps good" and "sometimes innovation gets away from the inventors"), but Village Voice reviewer Douglas Wolk laments that the book is "not quite coherent, and held together by soddenly peppy prose." Read the reviews in WIRED, the Village Voice or the Hollywood Reporter Browse Coleman's book at Amazon.com
Lawrence Lessig, a frequent writer on digital technology and intellectual property, is a Professor at Stanford Law School (formerly from Harvard's Law faculty) and founded Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. His most recent book is "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." A recent issue of WIRED magazine excerpted a section in which Lessig gives his account of the history of copyright protection. According to Lessig, "If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy." His contention is that copyright laws were developed in a haphazard, jumbled and reactionary way over the past 100 years as technology changed in sudden bursts, and as business people and artists also created innovative ways to exploit and protect creative work. Lessig's conclusion is that the most recent US copyright laws have tipped a delicate balance too much in favor of business, and against idea creators. Forbes magazine's Stephen Manes is more than a little skeptical of Lessig's claims. In fact, in his March 29, 2004 "Digital Tools" column, he's downright hostile, proposing an alternative title to Lessig's book: "Freeloader Culture: A Manifesto for Stealing Intellectual Property." Read an excerpt from Lessig's book in the March 2004 issue of WIRED Browse Lessig's latest book at Amazon.com Read Stephen Manes's counterpoint on Forbes magazine's site |
|
