Remix of John S.’s interpretations of Lessig’s Free Culture and mine.

After reading the introduction of Free Culture, I felt the story was that ideas that should be dynamic are often seized and manipulated by others. People have ideas that are often taken from them beyond their will. The Wright Brothers had their idea taken from them, but this spread of information helped form modern air travel. The freedom of flying was constrained by laws, which was antagonist to the Wright’s idea of air travel. The plot is that ideas want to spread, but are often regulated, and how problems can arise with property and rights when society is introduced to new technology The main characters are the spawners of ideas, the protagonists, and those that want to squash the freedom and spread of information, the antagonists. Lessig beautifully illustrates this by telling a series of short stories. These stories show how laws and rules change and evolve to keep up with the ever growing diverse plains of property and privacy. The first story is about the Causby's fruitless efforts to defend the airspace above their property from the military's superior 'chicken killin' war machine. The Causbys lost because the judge decided the old law was not suited for modern times. Sometimes society pays a greater toll than a few chickens, as in the story of Armstrong and his F.M. technology. Armstrong sought to improve communication between two points. His idea was stolen from him by RCA. The corporate giant took credit, and Armstrong was left almost helpless. Not only was the FM radio held back in the interest of corporation governance, but a man was destroyed in the process.