The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2001) is a book by Lawrence Lessig, at the time of writing a professor of law at Stanford Law School, who is well known as a critic of the extension of the copyright term in US.

One instance is Internet censorship in mainland China by sorting out geographical IP addresses.

The content layer is notoriously illustrated by Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service.

In the end, he stresses the importance of existing works entering the public domain in a reasonably short period of time, as the Founding Fathers intended.

On 15 January 2008, Lessig announced on his blog that his publishers agreed to license the book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, and the book in PDF format can be downloaded freely.