Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Lawrence Lessig's book is released today, online and for free. I haven't read it yet (it's printing out as I type this note) but the promo states: "Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture."

CRLFThis, of course, made me curious to see how my own online book, The Learning Marketplace, is doing (even though it's more of a compilation than a book) and it was interesting to see that it has been downloaded about 450 times since I released it in January. What's realling interesting, though, is that my 2001 book, Knowledge, Learning and Community, was downloaded about 1,000 times in the same three-month period. Go figure. Of course, Lessig will beat these numbers in the first hour. Doesn't bother me a bit.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2024 9:19 p.m.

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