Lawrence Lessig describes permission culture in contrast with free culture.

They call this system "permission culture".

The disparate features of a free culture and a permissions culture effect how culture is made.

An implication of permission culture is that creators are blocked by systemic procedures and this discourages innovation.

In a permissions culture, innovators must first request "permission" from past creators in order to build upon or modify past creations.

Lessig provides two examples that portray the difference between a free culture and a permissions culture - two themes that will develop throughout the book.

In opposition to the cultural commons stands the "permission culture," an epithet the Copy Left uses to describe the world it fears our current copyright law is creating.

Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture.

While permission culture describes a society in which previous creators or those with power must grant people permission to use material, free culture ensures that anyone is able to create without restrictions from the past.

Lessig argues that we are fast becoming a permissions culture, though he sees the internet as a modern-day Armstrong: it challenges the traditional innovator and seeks to break free of any permissions or strict regulations.

In this example, if the legal environment surrounding the early stages of photography had been stricter with what constituted ownership and leaned more towards permission culture, photography would have developed in a drastically different manner and would be limited.

Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased.

In the second, an example of a "permissions culture", he describes how David Sarnoff, president of RCA, managed to persuade the government to delay the deployment of the rival wideband FM radio, invented by Edwin Howard Armstrong.

A "permissions culture" is the opposite of a free culture; in a permissions culture, creators and innovators are only able to create and innovate with the permission of creators of the past - whether they be powerful creators or not.