I am reading The Future of Ideas by Lessig, and while I'm getting the order wrong (Code was published before The Future of Ideas), I would like to have read those two books before reading Free Culture. The ideas in the first half of The Future of Ideas are very exciting. I grew up listening to hiphop (still do), and only in the last 5 or six years did I understand the way hiphop works: it takes from the past and creates something new out of it. People--and to a degree rightly--criticize mainstream hiphop for too obviously taking from the past and creating something that isn't very new, but it you look at the edges you see something really interesting happening. DJ Shadow up until very recently did all of his work using a turntable, sampler and a drum machine. Everything on Endtroducing is a sample (I've read that over 1,000 samples were used!), and while some of the samples are obvious, credited and cleared, the overwhelming majority of them are not. Technically Shadow stole the samples, but he hoped they were obscure enough that the record labels wouldn't notice. That didn't stop a collaborative effort to identifiy the samples from appearing on the web, although that effort is fairly hidden, if not by password then by robots.txt. It's a shame that, while DJ Shadow does not mind the effort to document his work, he doesn't endorse it either, because he knows he would have to pay for a lot of the samples he uses on his records. Corporations are facing a legitimacy crisis, and efforts like the Creative Commons are very exciting alternatives that, like you say, allow artists to take back their work.