Last weekend, I spent the better part of an evening watching YouTube in a friend's living room. Five of us gathered around the television, took turns at the helm of a connected laptop and shared what I expect will become an increasingly common form of communal entertainment. Like cowboys telling tall tales around a roaring fire, we each shared the most exciting and outlandish discoveries we had made out there on the virtually ungoverned electronic frontier.

Surfing YouTube is the freest I've felt since the early days of Napster. Now don't get me wrong — I'm not anti-copyright. I mention YouTube because alongside all those Colbert Report clips and Sifl and Olly episodes, a wealth of fantastic user-generated content has found a home (and an audience) online. While many of these videos are fully legal, others flirt with infringement by re-combining sound and footage from copyrighted sources. As the RIAA and others exert increased pressure on YouTube to crack down on such violations, it's a nagging fear of mine that the creative baby will be thrown out with the copyrighted bathwater.

We all consume culture — film, art, literature, news, music, comics, blogs, etc. For the most part, we like to think that what's popular is popular because it's the best — the most engaging, the most intriguing, the most important, the most creative. And on sites like YouTube, this is more or less true. The selection is so vast, the content sources so diffuse, that social filtering sessions like the aforementioned YouTube night are a near necessity. Merit, not marketing, determines what videos get seen. And as a result of YouTube's commitment to host pretty much any type of content, every niche audience is catered to, and every niche creator gets a chance to find his or her audience. At the current moment, YouTube is a segment of the pop culture landscape that comes as close to full democratic freedom as I've ever seen.

And it feels so right.

As a disciple of Lawrence Lessig, I was pleased — thrilled, even — when I heard Free Culture had been chosen for this year's Penn Reading Project. When my class read The Tipping Point two years ago, it got me thinking in new ways about social networks, the spread of ideas, the processes by which people shape culture and how culture shapes people. Through Malcolm Gladwell I was led to The New Yorker, which led me to new ideas, which led me to more new ideas, etc., etc.

So as a free culture enthusiast, I've got a few suggestions for those of you intrigued by Lessig's ideas. I encourage you to let your own intellectual chain reactions guide you.  But for those who only made it to page 30, a brief recap: Lessig frames his argument by claiming copyright law in the United States is intended to nurture a richly creative society — an ideal taken directly from Article I of the U.S. Constitution. That is, copyright law is aimed primarily at protecting creativity, not business interests. Creativity, Lessig argues, develops by building on previous creativity (think of hip-hop artists' reliance on samples and documentary filmmakers' reliance on archival footage). But, in the past century, the U.S. Congress has gradually increased the term of copyright protection from a maximum of 28 years (with formal registration and renewal required) to an automatic 95 years of protection for works owned by corporations, or life plus 70 years for the works of individual artists. These changes in the law have come at the direct request of groups lobbying on behalf of entertainment giants such as Disney and Viacom, and there is no guarantee that copyright terms won't be stretched out indefinitely in order to keep profitable intellectual property from passing into the public domain. Simultaneously, with the rise of digital media, the scope and reach of copyright regulations have also increased (e.g. the digital rights management on files purchased from the iTunes music store).

In addition, copyright law is poorly organized, requiring an inordinate amount of time and effort to acquire the rights to incorporate parts of others' works in one's own. At the same time, penalties for copyright violations are inordinately large, often in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for minor infractions. The sum total of these factors is that the little guys are kept out of the mainstream media marketplace, and therefore away from the eyes and ears of the mass public. The way things stand today, only organizations with the financial resources to afford huge legal teams have any reasonable chance of making a substantial impact on mass culture. As Lessig states in the book's first chapter, "the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition."

The essential argument of Free Culture is that an information society must choose between a free (bottom-up) or a feudal (top-down) structure. In Lessig's view (and mine), a bottom-up culture is preferable to the top-down version fought for by the Disneys and Viacoms of the world. If we strive for a richer and more inclusive public discourse (as opposed to one based on the principle of maximum corporate profit), then copyright restrictions must be loosened.

Lessig goes on to relate the story of his prosecution of the case Eldred v. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court, which unsuccessfully challenged the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Such legal battles are crucial to the long term success of the free culture movement, but if there's one thing I'd like to stress as a follow-up to Lessig's book, it's that for a free culture to reach its maximum potential, more people must expose themselves to more alternative content. I prefer independent media because I find commercial culture consistently inferior: homogeneous, out of touch, packed with ads, boring. But don't take my word for it. Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), writes on his website shirky.com:

[T]he competitive edge of free content is increasing. In the '90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth paying for because it would be so hard to find.

In fact, the good stuff is becoming easier to find as the size of the system grows, not harder, because collaborative filters like Google and Technorati rely on rich link structure to sort through links. So offering free content is not just an evolutionary stable strategy, it is a strategy that improves with time, because the more free content there is the greater the advantage it has over for-fee content.

As time passes, freely available content is going to become better, bigger and more varied. Are you in, or are you out?

For now, no matter how exciting it may be, independent media just isn't promoted the way, say, Smallville is. Therefore, finding an audience takes a little more work on the part of the artist, and finding out what's good takes a little more work on the part of the consumer. If, as media consumers, we want to open our ears to many voices, this is a necessary burden. So turn off VH1, take a break from MySpace and have a look around at what else is going on out there.

How, you ask? As a fellow college student, I have a few suggestions.

First step to cultural freedom: RSS aggregation.

Do you wish there were an easier way to monitor updates to the vast number of fantastic web sites you come across? Well, practically all sources of regularly updated online content these days (blogs, news, podcasts, comics, etc.) offer what are called RSS feeds, short for Really Simple Syndication. Here's how it works: You subscribe to as many sites' feeds as you want through a piece of software (either through a browser or client-side), so the daily content of multiple sites can be corralled in one place and read at your leisure. This way, it's possible to keep up with what's happening in corners of the culture that just don't get mainstream coverage alongside updates from The New York Times and other can't-miss media outlets. Seriously, this is awesome. I spend way more time on Google Reader than in front of the TV. Wikipedia has full details on RSS for more information.

Second Step: support open source software. How? Use it. Are you using the default AOL Instant Messenger software? Switch to Gaim, one of the many open source alternatives. It provides the same AIM account, same buddy list, minus the ads and with a bunch of extra features (easier on your RAM, too). Still using Internet Explorer? Firefox is better — more customizable and more secure. Windows Media Player? So unwieldy! Use VLC instead. Microsoft Office? OpenOffice will handle all Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files just as well, and it's completely free. The list goes on and on. If so inclined, you're free to examine and modify the source code at will. Open source software has come a long way since its inception in the early '80s, and, due to the aforementioned evolutionary stability of such endeavors, it will only improve in the future.

Third: make something. Lessig's vision of a free culture thrives on bottom-up participation. Try your hand at making a remix, recording a song, shooting a film, starting a blog, producing a podcast, contributing to a piece of software or writing a Wikipedia article. The possibilities are endless, and a simple Google search will turn up a plethora of free tools and information to help you begin.

What else can you do? If you want to get serious about fighting for free culture, take action. Advocacy groups abound, all searching for as much help as they can get. At the forefront is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which funds legal battles and organizes political action in defense of personal freedoms. Knowledge is a lobbying group focused on relevant legislative goings-on. Another group, Downhill Battle, is centered on music-related issues. And Freeculture.org is a growing outreach organization with chapters at over 30 colleges around the country, including Penn.

If you don't find activism appealing, you can still promote the ideals of free culture in the long run. As a future lawyer, engineer, businessperson, writer, medical worker, academic — even simply as a voter — take a moment to consider how you might go about nudging the culture in the right direction. With this level of knowledge, you will be able to play an active role in eliminating outdated, restrictive laws and overbearing social norms. YouTube and its competitors offer a little taste of freedom, but so far the model of fully open, democratized content is the exception to the rule in a culture dominated by top-down content.

Free Culture isn't just a book.  It's a prompt, an encouragement to think clearly about our shared culture and your place in it. As Ivy League kids (especially you Whartonites!), it's up to us to guide free culture to its tipping point. It's a safe bet that in 10 or 20 years we're going to have significantly more cultural leverage than the average group of citizens, so let's use our power in the best possible way.