While some copyright owners are suing students and users who download their music, movies and books, Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig has made his most recent book available for free over the Internet.

Practicing the method he promotes in his new book — “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” — Lessig is searching for both a larger audience and a new approach to copyrighted work.

In his book, Lessig criticizes media companies using their monopolies and lawsuits to stifle creativity. Earlier this month the Recording Industry Association of America sued a Stanford student for the first time for copyright infringement for downloading songs.

Lessig debuted his new work in the traditional way, with a $24.95 price tag and a spot on the shelves of major bookstores across the nation. “Free Culture” was also released in its entirety in a free downloadable format, available via Web sites such Amazon.com and Lessig’s own free-culture.org.

Lessig said that convincing his publisher to allow the free release of the book was difficult at first.

Lessig presented two numbers to the publishing company, Penguin Press. The first was the estimated number of people who would decide not to buy the book due to its availability on the Internet. The second number, what Lessig called the “commercial interest,” was the number of people who would have had no interest in the book under regular circumstances, but due to the fact that a free copy was available online, would begin reading it and eventually buy a hard copy.

“Needless to say, the second number is larger than the first,” Lessig said.

In the end, Lessig said, he thinks most people will end up with a physical purchase.

“People don’t really like reading whole books online,” he said. “Amazon.com has a link on the site to download the book, and they’re a business — in it only for selling books.”

Lessig stated, however, that there was definitely anxiety on the part of the publisher to offer the book for free.

“It’s to their great credit that they’re willing to experiment,” he said. “If it works, more publishers will push to release books free online.”

Lessig is not the first author to release his book in an online format. Others have released their works online, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow was one of the first to use the “creative commons” license that Lessig champions. Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” — published by Tor Publishing — was received as a mainstream book, despite its novel license.

Under the “creative commons” copyright license (the same license that “Free Culture” is released under), not only could people download this book in its entirety online, they could make as many copies as they wanted and distribute them, as long as they credited the work to Doctorow. “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” shows the potential successes that book experiments such as this can have. Doctorow’s book, despite being available for free on the web, sold well and garnered great reviews from mainstream outlets such as The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly.

While Lessig used Doctorow’s case and his own projections to sell his experimental idea to the publisher, the real motive behind the free online version of the book was to be true to the work’s title.

“I want to put the information out there,” said Lessig.

Within the first launch day there were nine different formats of Free Culture available on the Internet. There are versions of the book that act as an editable PDF file, with readers being able to modify whatever they would like in the text.

“The work is spreading,” Lessig said. “These are creative reuses of the book, some of them I didn’t expect.”

“Free Culture” is Lessig’s third book, following his other successful works “Code” and “The Future of Ideas.” The new book discusses the consequences of a war against creativity on the Internet, being waged through litigation and legislation. According to Lessig’s Web site, this is an argument about our “freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.”

The content and context of this debate includes, but is not limited to, issues of file sharing, music remixes and original written content.

According to Lessig, “The copyright wars are causing harm to the opportunity of creativity in the Internet and we need to find a way to peace for the Internet that supports decentralized creativity. That’s not what Washington understands.”