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It is not easy having a calm conversation about media these days. The powerfully disruptive forces of technology are remaking the landscape, producing enormous winners and once-mighty losers, with the full impact on the culture, for good or for ill, yet to be determined. Consider that the largest media company in the world—Google—does not produce content; Google’s revenues are from advertising, and yet, in a marker of the times, its home is not on Madison Avenue but in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the recorded-music industry has been suing its fans for making digital copies of songs, even as the industry itself has yet to find a business model that works. Then there is the movie industry, which fears being next as it becomes widely possible to download massive streams of video. Television broadcasters, for their part, are not sure whether the web is friend or foe. What with all this creative destruction in the air (to borrow the apt phrase of the great economist Joseph Schumpeter), it is understandable that executives of traditional media companies have had little time for a sharp critique of what they regard as their most fundamental property right—their right, that is, to the intellectual content of their music, films, and video. Yet this right itself, protected under the traditional laws of copyright, is very much under siege. The most potent bombs have been thrown by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor, litigator, and author.

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