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Lessig, Lawrence --- "(Re)creativity: How Creativity Lives" [2006] ELECD 98; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Copyright and Other Fairy Tales" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Copyright and Other Fairy Tales

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845426019

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: (Re)creativity: How Creativity Lives

Author(s): Lessig, Lawrence

Number of pages: 8

Extract:

1. (Re)creativity: how creativity lives
Lawrence Lessig
I come from California, the land of the technology-obsessed. It's also the land
of Hollywood, where the people are Hollywood-obsessed. But in this chapter,
I would like to ask you to forget about technology and to forget about
Hollywood, and to focus instead upon culture. In particular, upon how culture
gets created and how culture gets spread, and about the relationship between
authors and readers. My aim is to remind us about the importance of both at a
time when the importance of one has been forgotten.
In 1865, Lewis Carroll published the extraordinary work, Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland. Sometime in the twentieth century (it depends
upon where you are), the Carroll's copyright expired, and the work passed into
the public domain. In 2001, as a demonstration of its new E-Book Reader tech-
nology, Adobe created an e-book version of this public domain text. The e-
book was produced from a text created by the Gutenberg Project, a project
designed to make works in the public domain available for free on the Internet.
But when Alice's Adventures got translated into its Adobe E-Book version,
the freedoms of the public domain had mysteriously disappeared. There was a
button on the very first page that listed the `permissions' that ran with the
book. If you clicked on that button, you were given a list of `permissions' that
were in fact restrictions on the uses you ...