Critical Reception
In a review in The New York Times, Adam Cohen found Free Culture to be a "powerfully argued and important analysis," where Lessig argues persuasively that we are in a crisis of cultural impoverishment. However, he says that "after taking us to this point, 300 pages into his analysis," Lessig "fails to deliver," and his proposals are both "impractical and politically unattainable."
David Post argues that Lessig shows that "free culture" has always been a part of our intellectual heritage and illuminates the tension between the already created and not yet created. Although Post generally agrees with Lessig's argument, he does point out that copyrights are property rights and "property rights are, as a general rule, a good thing" and that Lessig does not do enough in his book to address this side of the debate.
Read more about this topic: Free Culture (book)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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