An exciting examination of the core values of cyberspace - intellectual property, free speech, and privacy - from one of Americas most brilliant young legal theorists. . How should we regulate cyberspace? Can we? Its a cherished belief of techies and net denizens everywhere that cyberspace is fundamentally, unalterably impossible to regulate. Thus the legendary freedom of the Net. Lawrence Lessig warns that, if were not careful, well wake up one day to discover that the character of cyberspace has changed out from under us. Commercial forces will dictate the change, and architecture - the very structure of cyberspace itself - will dictate the form our interactions can and cannot take. The author of the classic paper Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace, Lessig shows how code can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how architectures influence peoples behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code affect the pressing issues of free speech, intellectual property, and privacy in cyberspace. Theres a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulatedthat it is, in its very essence, immune from the governments (or anyone elses) control. Code argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no nature. It only has codethe software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedomas the original architecture of the Net didor a place of exquisitely oppressive control. If we miss this point, then we will miss how cyberspace is changing. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where our behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But thats not inevitable either. We canwe mustchoose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.
Everyone knows that cyberspace is a wild frontier that can't be regulated, right? Everyone is wrong and that's why we should all read Harvard Law professor (and famous Microsoft trial expert) Lawrence Lessig's eye-opening, jaw-dropping book
Code, the best guide yet to the future that's heading our way like a frictionless freight train. For such an analytical book, it's also anecdote-studded and utterly fun to read.
Lessig leads us through the new controversies in intellectual property, privacy, free speech and national sovereignty. What about a computer worm that can search every American's PC for top-secret NSA documents? It sounds obviously unconstitutional but the worm code can't read your letters, bust down your door, scare you or arrest anyone innocent. If you're not guilty, you won't even know you were searched. The coded architecture of the Net also enforces certain freedoms: Via the Net, we have now globally exported a more extreme form of free speech than the First Amendment encodes in old-fashioned law. The once-important Pentagon Papers case would be meaningless today; instead of fighting to publish secret government documents, the New York Times could simply leak them to a USENET newsgroup. The Constitution is rife with ambiguities the framers couldn't have imagined and virtual communities such as AOL and LamdaMOO are organising themselves in ways governed largely by code--strikingly different ones.
We've got tough choices ahead. Do we want to protect intellectual property or privacy? How do we keep cyberporn from kids--by brain-dead decency laws, censoring filters or a code that identifies kid users? (Lessig advocates code.) Lessig demonstrates that legal structures are too slow and politics-averse to regulate cyberspace. "Courts are disabled, legislatures pathetic and code untouchable." Code writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the new world, backed by the law and commerce. Lessig thinks citizens must recognise the need to be the architects of their own fate or they'll find themselves coded into a world they never made. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com
