The Hippie Professor and his PDF book

OVER THE LAST month, rivers of ink have flowed, and loads of bytes have scuttled across the Net about a book that so-called Cyberpunks, DMCA haters and other interweb freedom advocates seem to love. That's Free Culture, the latest book by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who - just for the record - previously wrote titles like Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas .

Yet another book release wouldn't be much news, hadn't he quietly released this one as a free PDF download about a month ago, even sparking derivative versions in a matter of days. This was possible because the bits based version is released under the Creative Commons licence. This free PDF version of the book, can be downloaded from a server at Stanford University, or from the BitTorrent P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing network, which seems to be all the rage lately.

The author, referred to as "a cultural environmentalist", who many years ago was a court-appointed "special master" in the antitrust suit against the Vole, who has criticised SCO's Darling McBride, and who happens to be the founder of the Center for Internet Law and Society at Stanford, thinks that current copyright laws are "poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation" and calls his book "a wake-up showing how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting".

He writes: "For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?"

He continues: "A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here." Of course, if you want to help professor Lessig and Penguin Press, the publishers of the tree based version of the book, you can also buy the book for around $16.97 or £12.66 on web merchants Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and the like.

A group of bloggers have even created an "audible" version of this book, by reading aloud different chapters and hosting mp3 files across the interweb. Anyhow, despite this being somewhat old news, I haven't finished reading it yet, so I can't say if it's worth the five stars rating it currently enjoys on the Amazonian retail behemoth.

The question, however, is another: would you publish your own book like Mr. Lessig, simultaneously on paper and also distributing it for free, under a licence like Creative Commons? Have you read this book fully? Do you agree with the hippie professor? To voice your opinion, click to let me know. µ