A long article on intellectual property and copyrights by Lessig. This is a must read if the subject interests you.

Control & Creativity
The future of ideas is in the balance
By Lawrence Lessig

Though I don’t (yet) believe this view of America Online, it is the most cynical image of Time Warner’s marriage to AOL: the forging of an estate of large-scale networks with power over users to an estate dedicated to almost perfect control over content, through intellectual property and other government-granted exclusive rights. The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered. What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution. Cable television on speed, addicting a much more manageable, malleable and sellable public.

The future that we could have is much harder to describe. It is harder because the very premise of the Internet is that no one can predict how it will develop. The architects who crafted the first protocols of the Net had no sense of a world where grandparents would use computers to keep in touch with their grandkids. They had no idea of a technology where every song imaginable is available within thirty seconds’ reach. The World Wide Web was the fantasy of a few MIT computer scientists. The perpetual tracking of preferences that allows a computer in Washington state to suggest an artist I might like because of a book I just purchased was an idea that no one had made famous before the Internet made it real.
[read more]

thanks to also not found in nature