Law Commons^™

Of late, there has been a spate of popular and academic books decrying that copyright law has a detrimental impact upon freedom of expression. Most notably, in Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig has tilted at the comforting, consoling fiction of the Supreme Court of the United States in Harper & Row that ‘copyright is an engine of free expression’. He complains:

"Now that technology enables us to rebuild the library of Alexandria, the law gets in the way. And it doesn’t get in the way for any useful copyright purpose, for the purpose of copyright is to enable the commercial market …