David Akin, Righting copywrongs, the Globe and Mail, April 10, 2004. Akin summarizes Lessig's experience convincing Penguin and Amazon.com to release Free Culture as a free download under a Creative Commons license. It is noted that Free Culture at one point held 36th position on Amazon's best-seller list. "'Here's Amazon trying do one thing: sell books. So why are they giving away a book that they're trying to sell? I think they understand, too, that this is a good way to get people into buying the book,' Lessig said." MP3 recordings of the book made and posted by various indivdiuals are also documented. Rev. A.K.M. Adam (aka AKMA,) one of those who led a movement to make audio versions of the work, commented: "This is one of the counter-intuitive lessons that the U.S. needs desperately to learn from a legal institutional point-of-view and that capitalist business enterprises need to learn for their own advancement and that is that freely available works on-line are not antithetical to highly produced, packaged, refined versions of the work through conventional venues." (Source: Scripting News)
Posted by
Garrett at 4/10/2004 10:21:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
