Prof Lessig's upcoming work on Big Content's use and abuse of intellectual property policy and law has been excerpted in the latest issue of Wired. Lessig makes the important point that the creative destruction of piracy has always increased the size of the media business.

If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation - until now.

Movies, TV, cable, radio, in addition to making liberal use of the public domain, are all the stepchildren of piracy, having appropriated existing content for their own ends without permission. As is so often the case when we move from revolution to institution, once the peasants have occupied the castle they pull up the drawbridge behind them.