Thursday 17 November 2005
Ever wonder about what your rights are when using copyrighted material? What’s fair use in these days of computers and the internet when media – whole books, music, and movies – can be copied in their digital formats a thousand times and moved around the planet in an instant at the click of a mouse?
Copyright and fair use of copyrighted materials are complicated issues with a long history here in the United States. One of the most readable books on copyright released in 2004 is titled Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Copyright and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor. The full text of Free Culture is widely available for free in pdf, text, and other formats on the Internet.
You can listen to recorded chapters of Free Culture for free in mp3 streaming audio format at the Internet Archive website by following this link. If you prefer, you can download chapters there to listen on your mp3 player.
