I'm working my way backward through the Lawrence Lessig trilogy, having started with Free Culture, which I wrote about last July. I just finished The Future of Ideas on the train today.

The themes are, of course, very similar. Where Free Culture dealt with (duh) cultural things like music, art, and literature, however, this book dealt more with technological and business-oriented innovation. His concerns are essentially the same in both cases: the government is moving too quickly to entrench the Old in their positions, granting them extended copyright, liberal patent, and other protections, all to the detriment of the New. His point is not that the New should win for the sake of being new, but that general human progress is made by allowing new technology and practice to overtake the old. If we continue putting in hurdles for the New to jump, we'll significantly retard their ability to innovate, leaving us stagnant in the hands of the Old, who, for perfectly sane business reasons, have no desire to make radical changes. The Old merely want to get marginal increases on what they've already got.

The unfortunate thing about what Lessig says is that his solutions are so pie-in-the-sky. They always involve the government finally standing up to big business and saying, "Hey, you know what we're going to do? We're going to do what's best for the people." Of course, that'll never happen. It's in the nature of our big-money political system that the in-power (both business-wise and political-wise) stay in power, and even if Lessig sells three million copies of his book, that's not going to write a campaign check for any Senators.