While Lessig wrote about the niceties of the law, his real argument was about culture. Despite his elite pedigree—Oxbridge degree, Supreme Court clerkship—he formulated a case that was radical, borderline utopian. He wrote with wonderstruck lyricism. The Internet would change the means of cultural production, he argued. In the twentieth century, culture had been ripped from the people. It had been placed under the rule of avaricious corporations, which pumped out profitable dreck. The masses were reduced to mere consumers, passive couch-bound recipients of movies, television, and music
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