Lawrence Lessig’s most recent book Remix: Making Art & Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy was finally put under a CC license today and is not available for free on Lessig’s site.

Currently I’m working on my thesis researching issues of anti-capitalism, digital piracy and Creative Commons and how these forces are reshaping ‘the music industries’. As a result of the subject matter, a vast amount of my resources happens to be licensed under CC.  Often I’ll buy the book if I’m going to read it in entirety, but for research purposes accumulating a free library of PDFs has saved me so much time and lead me in directions I may not have stumbled upon.

Anyway, here are a few recommended (and free!) books I’ve been reading:

Remix, Free Culture, The Future of Ideas and Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig
Capitalism 3.0 – Peter Barnes
The Wealth of Networks – Yochai Benkler
The Pirates Dilema – Matt Mason

In addition, PDF Search Engine is really helpful for finding books:
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/

And I’ve found that Mac Spotlight (the free search thingy on everyone’s Mac) is great research tool. I can comb through hundreds of PDFs instantly. It’s kind of like having a local version of Google Books search.