Larry Lessig has a good talk about free culture. There’s nothing in there that won’t be familiar to people who’ve read Lessig’s book, but it does a good job of briefly and succinctly laying out his basic argument.
One thing that’s worth mentioning, though. Lessig’s telling of the Causby decision is a little misleading. Yes, Justice Douglas rejected Blackstone’s notion that, in general, property rights reach to the heavens. But the Causby’s still won. What Lessig doesn’t mention is that the airplanes in question weren’t just flying over the Causby’s land. Their land was adjacent to a military base and the airplanes were at extremely low altitude when they crossed the Causby’s land, creating deafening noise.
I don’t really understand why Lessig gives the misleading impression that the Causbys lost the case. Yes, it complicates the story a little bit, but I think it would be perfectly possible to tell the story accurately and still preserve his basic, entirely valid, and quite powerful point about the importance of common sense in the law.
I used Lessig’s story myself a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t do my due diligence of reading the original case and so I wound up giving the same misleading impression Lessig did. Were I writing that article today, I definitely would have framed it differently. The full story is plenty powerful; there’s no need to oversimplify it.
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