It may not be possible today to produce another Mickey Mouse, because many of its early cartoon themes might be considered "derivative works" of some existing copyrighted material (as indicated in the subtitle to the hardback edition and in numerous examples in this book).

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution says, "The Congress shall have Power... to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Free Culture's message is different, Lessig writes, because it is "about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important."

He also argues for the creation of shorter renewable periods of copyright and a limitation on derivative rights, such as limiting a publisher's ability to stop the publication of copies of an author's book on the internet for non-commercial purposes or create a compulsory licensing scheme to ensure that creators obtain direct royalties for their works based upon their usage statistics and some kind of taxation scheme such as suggested by professor William Fisher of Harvard Law School[4] that is similar to a longstanding proposal of Richard Stallman.

In the first, an example of "free culture", he describes how aircraft operators did not have to abide by an old law that land owners also owned the air above the property and thus could forbid overflight.

[7] In the second, an example of a "permission culture", he describes how David Sarnoff, president of RCA, managed to persuade the United States government to delay the deployment of the rival wideband FM radio, invented by Edwin Howard Armstrong.

"[18] This new role of law is meant to protect copyright owners from "pirates" who share their content for free, effectively "robbing" the creator of any profit.

Copyright law has also been extended to threaten the very creativity that is a central value of our society, burdening it "with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties."

[34] Modern technology allows people to copy or cut and paste video clips in creative new ways to produce art, entertainment, and new modes of expression and communication that didn't exist before.

The resulting potential for media literacy could help ordinary people not only communicate their concerns better but also make it easier for them to understand when they are being suckered into things not in their interests.

[39] Copyright has changed from covering just books, maps and charts to any work today that has a tangible form including music to architecture and drama and software.

However, the combined effects of the changes in these five dimensions has been to restrict, rather than promote, the progress of science and useful arts, in apparent violation of the constitutional justification for copyright law.

[48] Lessig claims this kind of environment is not democratic,[49] and at no point in our history have people had fewer "legal right[s] to control more of the development of our culture than now.

Lessig insists that the future of society is being threatened by recent changes in US law and administration, including decisions by the US Federal Communications Commission that allow increased Concentration of media ownership.

This change has had a chilling effect on creativity, serving to reduce competition to the established media companies, as suggested by the subtitle to the original hardback edition of Free Culture.

[64] Similarly, the record industry grew out of piracy due to a loophole in the law permitting composers exclusivity to copies of their music and its public performance, but not over reproduction via the new phonograph and player piano technologies.

As in the case with recorded music, law ultimately settled this score by setting a price at which cable companies would pay copyright holders for their content.

On the other hand, creators shun the notion of having their intellectual property at the disposal of pirates, and so agree to delimit commonality through strict copyright laws.

The resulting potential for media literacy could help ordinary people not only communicate their concerns better but also make it easier for them to understand when they are being suckered into things not in their interests (as indicated in chapter 2 of this book).

Constraining Creators: This section explores how the current law makes the use of new digital technologies, such as e-mailing a Comedy Central clips, "presumptively illegal".

[90] Further extension seems likely, because it makes good business sense for organizations owning old works that still generate revenue to spend a portion of that money on campaign contributions and lobbying to extend the terms even further.

In the afterword, Lessig proposes practical solutions to the dispute over intellectual property rights, in hope that common sense and a proclivity toward free culture be revived.

They wrote that Lessig's claim that "the Internet and intellectual property law are being used by powerful media forces as a tool for suppressing creativity in the pursuit of pure economic benefit" is too bleak and perhaps exaggerated when it comes to the present situation, but they agreed that the trends he illustrates are real and can become increasingly problematic in the future.

For the "most distinctive contribution of the book", he singled out the argument that technology can take content or activities that were historically free (such as reading or lending) and make them subject to unfair control by the provider of new  mediums or services, therefore reducing our freedom to act.

He states that the book's "main strengths lie in its empirical richness and in Lessig's mastery at placing current legal developments in a wide historical context".

He concludes that while Lessig's may be suffering from a "tunnel vision", the book "retains enough objectivity and academic rigor to make it an interesting and important read in this debate".

The book, he writes, successfully asserts: "how an excess of intellectual property can lead to results that seem silly, pernicious or wrong", how "our legal traditions actually sanction unauthorized copying", and how "the social forces that are pushing for further expansion of copyright, the big media companies, are the bad guys".

In the end, he concludes, the book, while obviously written to advance a particular point of view, is "a model of restraint", presenting "an account that, while opinionated, is nuanced, fair, and balanced" and calling the result "intelligent, entertaining and moving".

[110] A day after the book was released online, blogger AKMA (A. K. Adam) suggested that people pick a chapter and make a voice recording of it, partly because they were allowed to.

[citation needed] Besides audio production, this book was also translated into Chinese, a project proposed by Isaac Mao and completed as a collaboration involving many bloggers from mainland China and Taiwan.