The cultural dimension of the digital rights wars

Bruce Abramson, author of Digital Phoenix (a book on my reading list), reviews Darknet, along with Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library and Doug Henwood's After the New Economy on his The Informationist blog.

Excerpt:

Lasica, like Lessig, illustrates this theme through anecdotes. Unlike Lessig, who try as he might cannot escape his legal background, Lasica writes with a journalist’s ease. More importantly, though, Lasica writes from the perspective of a cultural consumer, rather than that of a putative deregulator. That vantage point allows him to inject a sense of shock that Lessig never quite conveys. In other words, whereas Lessig tells his readers “things are wrong,” Lasica states incredulously, “you must be kidding.” Each of Lasica’s characters—a music producer turned entertainment industry consultant, a high-tech black preacher, superfans of TV’s Firefly and Hollywood’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, and others—make (and in some cases, pioneer) valuable creative contributions to society. Rather than receiving the sorts of accolades that such contributions warrant, however, they find themselves either facing legal action or relegated to a world of underground culture, the “darknet.” Lasica’s cultural (rather than legal) perspective also positions him to begin with a dilemma and follow it into whichever legal corner it happens to occupy, whether copyright, patent, telecommunications, or some other realm. His coverage of the cultural dimension is therefore considerably more complete than anything that I offered in Digital Phoenix, and superior even to Lessig’s discussions in Free Culture.