From Free Culture by L Lessig page 112-113:
"Every bit of creative property goes through different "lives.?" In its first life, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is successful for the creator. The vast majority of creative property doesn’t enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is extremely important.Without this commercial market, there would be, many argue, much less creativity.
After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.
The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is after about a year³). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture. Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative property does not hold true with the most important components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these—television, movies,music, radio, the Internet—there is no guarantee of a second life. For these sorts of culture, it is as if we’ve replaced libraries with Barnes & Noble superstores. With this culture, what’s accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands. Beyond that, culture disappears."
Culture is built with Thrown Away Conversations.
If Conversations don't become Waste - Culture Disappears.
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