--This PDF version of Free Culture is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This license permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, click the icon above, or visit <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/>. Buy a copy of this book: click here1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132S33R4TH PASS PAGES14773_00_i-xviii_r9jm.qxd 2/10/04 3:46 PM Page viTHE PENGUIN PRESS a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © Lawrence Lessig, 2004 All rights reserved Excerpt from an editorial titled “The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity,” The New York Times, January 16, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. Cartoon by Paul Conrad on page 159. Copyright Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Diagram on page 164 courtesy of the office of FCC Commissioner, Michael J. Copps. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lessig, Lawrence. Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity / Lawrence Lessig. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-59420-006-8 (hardcover) 1. Intellectual property—United States. 2. Mass media—United States. 3. Technological innovations—United States. 4. Art—United States. I. Title. KF2979.L47 2004 343.7309'9—dc22 2003063276 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America 13579108642 Designed by Marysarah Quinn Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please pur-chase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.12345678910111213141516Co171819202122232425262728293031S32R334TH PASS PAGES14773_00_i-xviii_r9jm.qxd 2/10/04 3:46 PM Page viiTo Eric Eldred—whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it continues still. ❚❘❙❚❘❙ ❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚ ❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❘ ❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙ ❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚❘❘❘❙❚❘❙❚ ❙❚❘❙❚❘❙❚12345678910111213141516Co171819202122232425262728293031S32R334TH PASS PAGES14773_02_175-306_r7jm.qxd 2/10/04 4:03 PM Page 213CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Eldred In 1995, a father was frustrated that his daughters didn’t seem to like Hawthorne. No doubt there was more than one such father, but at least one did something about it. Eric Eldred, a retired computer program-mer living in New Hampshire, decided to put Hawthorne on the Web. An electronic version, Eldred thought, with links to pictures and explanatory text, would make this nineteenth-century author’s work come alive. It didn’t work—at least for his daughters. They didn’t find Haw-thorne any more interesting than before. But Eldred’s experiment gave birth to a hobby, and his hobby begat a cause: Eldred would build a library of public domain works by scanning these works and making them available for free. Eldred’s library was not simply a copy of certain public domain works, though even a copy would have been of great value to people across the world who can’t get access to printed versions of these works. Instead, Eldred was producing derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney turned Grimm into stories more 2131234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132S33R4TH PASS PAGES14773_02_175-306_r7jm.qxd 2/10/04 4:03 PM Page 214<http://free-culture.org/get-it>accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred transformed Hawthorne, and many others, into a form more accessible—technically accessi-ble—today. Eldred’s freedom to do this with Hawthorne’s work grew from the same source as Disney’s. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter had passed into the public domain in 1907. It was free for anyone to take without the per-mission of the Hawthorne estate or anyone else. Some, such as Dover Press and Penguin Classics, take works from the public domain and produce printed editions, which they sell in bookstores across the country. Others, such as Disney, take these stories and turn them into animated cartoons, sometimes successfully (Cinderella), sometimes not (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Treasure Planet). These are all commer-cial publications of public domain works. The Internet created the possibility of noncommercial publications of public domain works. Eldred’s is just one example. There are liter-ally thousands of others. Hundreds of thousands from across the world have discovered this platform of expression and now use it to share works that are, by law, free for the taking. This has produced what we might call the “noncommercial publishing industry,” which before the Internet was limited to people with large egos or with political or so-cial causes. But with the Internet, it includes a wide range of individu-als and groups dedicated to spreading culture generally.1 As I said, Eldred lives in New Hampshire. In 1998, Robert Frost’s collection of poems New Hampshire was slated to pass into the public domain. Eldred wanted to post that collection in his free public library. But Congress got in the way. As I described in chapter 10, in 1998, for the eleventh time in forty years, Congress extended the terms of exist-ing copyrights—this time by twenty years. Eldred would not be free to add any works more recent than 1923 to his collection until 2019. In-deed, no copyrighted work would pass into the public domain until that year (and not even then, if Congress extends the term again). By contrast, in the same period, more than 1 million patents will pass into the public domain. 214 FREE CULTURE12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031S32R334TH PASS PAGES14773_02_175-306_r7jm.qxd 2/10/04 4:03 PM Page 215This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), enacted in