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Lessig's main point is essentially that our current system of copyright law is absolutely absurd and outdated. The example he uses of Stephanie Lenz's story really gets my blood boiling. I just cannot begin to fathom how what she did is unacceptable. She filmed a video of her kid dancing to some music on TV, who cares? Who are the lawyers who pushed for this? How do this people sleep at night?

Read Only, or RO, culture is media created that we can't give back to. This is essentially all media created before the internet age; newspapers, books, records, CDs, movies, TV, etc. Read/Write, or RW, culture is culture in which the consumers are also the creators. In an RW culture we the consumers take the media that we consume, digest it, and re-create it. Essentially it is what students do on college campuses everyday, and what kids everywhere do on their computers all of the time.

Lessig uses Sousa because he and Lessig are kindred spirits of sorts. Though separated by many decades, both support read/write culture. Sousa was worried that the prominence of the phonograph, a read only technology, would eliminate what we now call read/write culture. Like Sousa, Lessig is a major supporter of RW culture.