"Salon is running an excellent review of two new books concerning how
control over intellectual property is harming our cultural creativity. The first
is, of course, Larry Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (which is also
available for free in a variety of formats including audio download as read
by various net.celebrities and annotated wiki). This book, not surprisingly
has been badly misunderstood already by some reviewers. However, it
makes some very good points about the nature of creativity - and how so
much of it depends on building off the works of others. Now, however,
thanks to the efforts of some copyright holders trying to overly protect their
works, that sort of creativity is stymied - even if it's the same creativity that
was used to build them up in the first place. The other book is Siva
Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between
Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System,
which goes into much more detail about the importance of less rigid rules
and regulations in promoting creative expression. "

http://www.techdirt.com/books/