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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 freesoftware
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, be-
xiv PREFACE