PREFACE

At the end of his review of my first book, /Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace/,
David Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer-
related texts, wrote this:

"Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't
affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world
population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip
off the modem." [1]

Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book-that software, or "code,"
functioned as a kind of law-and his review suggested the happy thought that if
life in cyberspace got bad, we could always "drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome"-
like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the modem, unplug the
computer, and any troubles that exist in /that/ space wouldn't "affect" us
anymore.

Pogue might have been right in 1999-I'm skeptical, but maybe. But even if he was
right then, the point is not right now: /Free Culture/ is about the troubles the
Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how
the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected
"people who aren't online." There is no switch that will insulate us from the
Internet's effect.

But unlike /Code/, the argument here is not much about the Internet itself. It
is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that
is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit,
much more important.

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that
follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture"-not "free" as in "free beer"
(to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement [2]), but
"free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise,"
"free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators
and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights.
But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee
that follow-on creators and innovators remain /as free as possible/ from the
control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a
free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free
culture is a "permission culture"-a culture in which creators get to create only
with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

If we understood this change, I believe we would resist it. Not "we" on the Left
or "you" on the Right, but we who have no stake in the particular industries of
culture that defined the twentieth century. Whether you are on the Left or the
Right, if you are in this sense disinterested, then the story I tell here will
trouble you. For the changes I describe affect values that both sides of our
political culture deem fundamental.

We saw a glimpse of this bipartisan outrage in the early summer of 2003. As the
FCC considered changes in media ownership rules that would relax limits on media
concentration, an extraordinary coalition generated more than 700,000 letters to
the FCC opposing the change. As William Safire described marching "uncomfortably
alongside CodePink Women for Peace and the National Rifle Association, between
liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative Ted Stevens," he formulated perhaps most
simply just what was at stake: the concentration of power. And as he asked,

"Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power-
political, corporate, media, cultural-should be anathema to conservatives. The
diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual
participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of
democracy." [3]

This idea is an element of the argument of /Free Culture/, though my focus is
not just on the concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership,
but more importantly, if because less visibly, on the concentration of power
produced by a radical change in the effective scope of the law. The law is
changing; that change is altering the way our culture gets made; that change
should worry you-whether or not you care about the Internet, and whether you're
on Safire's left or on his right.

[Section Break]

The inspiration for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes
from the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I