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:
“It would be easy ... to regard the whole of world 3 as timeless, as Plato suggested of his world of Forms or Ideas.... I propose a different view—one which, I have found, is surprisingly fruitful. I regard world 3 as being essentially the product of the human mind.... More precisely, I regard the world 3 of problems, theories, and critical arguments as one of the results of the evolution of human language, and as acting back on this evolution.”
—Karl Popper (1902–1994)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)