Code: And Other Laws Of Cyberspace - Hardcover

Lessig, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046503912X ISBN 13: 9780465039128

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated—that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) 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 code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom—as the original architecture of the Net did—or 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 that's not inevitable either. We can—we must—choose 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.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Harvard Law School and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the Inside Flap

"[Lessig] has staked out a role as one of academia's avant-garde thinkers about cyberspace and the law."
The Wall Street Journal

"Lessig's exposition reads like a Stanley Kubrick film, with the menace made palpable by new technologies....It is a troubling book, and one that needs to be taken seriously."
Daniel Bell
author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

"Lessig penetrates the cyberfluff to reveal the deep structure of our brave new world."
Bruce Ackerman
Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University

"This may be the most important book ever published about the Internet, as well as one of the most readable. Lessig's ideas are deep and insightful, and they will shape the way the future develops. He is a master at seeing the important ideas lurking behind things we all take for granted."
Mark A. Lemley
Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"Lawrence Lessig exposes the limits of prevailing views about how cyberspace is (and is not) regulated, and makes a compelling case for the urgency of learning to transcend those limits. Code is essential reading for those who care about the future of cyberspace, and of the human society within which "cyberspace" plays an increasingly central role."
Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown University Law Center

"Lawrence Lessig takes seriously the proposition that, in cyberspace, code is the law, and he traces out the consequences in a lucid and insightful way. If you want to know what daily life will be like in the computer-mediated twenty-first century, this is essential reading."
William J. Mitchell

"Lawrence Lessig is a James Madison of our time, crafting the lineaments of a well-tempered cyberspace. This book is a primer of "running code" for digital civilization. Like Madison, Lessig is a model of balance, judgement, ingenuity, and persuasive argument."
Stewart Brand
author of The Media Lab and The Clock of the Long Now

"Lessig's book is an astonishing achievement. The nation's leading scholar of cyberspace has produced a paradigm-shifting work that will transform the debate about the architecture of cyberspace. Lessig challenges us to make choices about freedom, privacy, intellectual property, and technology that most of us didn't recognize as choices in the first place. This dark, exhilarating work is the most important book of its generation about the relationship between law, cyberspace, and social organization."
Jeffrey Rosen
Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic

Reviews

Keane, author of Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995) and editor of Havel's Power of the Powerless (reprint 1990), argues the Czech playwright-politician has taught the world "more about the powerful and the powerless, power-grabbing and power-sharing, than virtually any other of his twentieth-century rivals." But Keane views his study as a tragedy because "Havel suffered the misfortune of being born into the twentieth century," with earth-shaking changes--from the fall of the Hapsburg empire through Nazism and Communism to the effort to build democratic institutions. Rather than an inclusive biography, Keane offers a series of tableaux vivants, capturing key moments in Havel's often dramatic life but emphasizing the impact of external forces he could not control. Although Keane celebrates Havel's contribution to the analysis of power and to his nation's post-Communist recovery, he makes clear Havel's political limitations as well. Where interest in Eastern European democracy is strong, this postmodern assessment of Havel's career should circulate. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Lessig (law, Harvard) tackles the tricky and troubling question of Internet regulation. Cyberspace has no intrinsic structure to protect its libertarian nature, and we are now well into an era where commerce and its partner in control, government, are working in a manner that could permanently, and perhaps negatively, alter its character. Now is the time for all who stand to benefit from the unique nature of cyberspace to assert their collective values into a framework for regulating it. Apathy or inaction, Lessig argues, would result in a medium shaped by special interests. His book is replete with examples of failed attempts to address cyberspace issues, such as the 1996 Communications Decency Act. A central theme is that the architecture of cyberspace can be coded to address properly salient issues related to free speech, intellectual property, and privacy. This is a vital book for concerned citizens of cyberspace. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Lib., New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

In the spring of 1996, at an annual conference organized under the name "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" (CFP), two science-fiction writers told stories about cyberspace's future. Vernor Vinge spoke about "ubiquitous law enforcement," made possible by "fine-grained distributed systems"; through computer chips linked by the Net to every part of social life, a portion would be dedicated to the government's use. This architecture was already being built -it was the Internet- and technologists were already describing its extensions. As this network of control became woven into every part of social life, it would be just a matter of time, Vinge threatened, before government claimed its fair share of control. Each new generation of code would increase this power of government. The future would be a world of perfect regulation, and the architecture of distributed computing, the Internet and its attachments, would make that possible.

Tom Maddox followed Vinge. His vision was very similar, though the source of control, different. The government's power would not come just from chips. The real source of power, Maddox argued, was an alliance between government and commerce. Commerce, like government, fares better in a better regulated world. Property is more secure, data are more easily captured, and disruption is less of a risk. The future would be a pact between these two forces of social order.

Code and commerce.

When these two authors spoke, the future they described was not yet present. Cyberspace was increasingly everywhere, but it was hard to imagine it tamed to serve the ends of government. And commerce was certainly interested, though credit card companies were still warning customers to stay far away from the Net. The Net was an exploding social space of something. But it was hard to see it as an exploding space of social control.

I didn't see either speech. I listened to them through my computer, three years after they spoke. Their words had been recorded; they now sit archived on a server at MIT It takes a second to tune in and launch the replay of their speeches about a perfectly ordered network of control. The very act of listening to these lectures given several years before, served on a reliable and indexed platform that no doubt recorded the fact that I had listened, across high-speed, commercial Internet lines that feed my apartment both the Net and ABC News, confirmed something of their account. One can hear in the audience's reaction a recognition both that these authors were talking fiction, they were science-fiction writers, after all, and that the fiction they spoke terrified.

Three years later it is no longer fiction. It is not hard to understand how the Net could become the perfect space of regulation or how commerce would play a role in that regulation. The current battle over MP3, a technology for compressing audio files for simple distribution across the Net, is a perfect example. Last year MP3 was quite the rage: CDs were copied and e-mailed, and web sites were built with thousands of songs archived and ready for anyone to take. "Free music" joined the list of free stuff that the Internet would serve.

But this year the story has changed. The recording industry is pushing a standard that would make it easier to control the distribution of these files; Congress has passed a statute that makes it a felony to produce software that evades this control; and one company that produces Sony Walkman like machines to play MP3 files has already announced plans to enable its machine to comply with these standards of control. Control will be coded, by commerce, with the backing of the government.

Vinge and Maddox were first-generation theorists of cyberspace. They could tell their stories about perfect control because they lived in a world that couldn't be controlled. They could connect with their audience because it too wanted to resist the future they described. Envisioning this impossible world was sport.

Now the impossible has been made real. Much of the control in Vinge's and Maddox's stories that struck many of their listeners as Orwellian now seems quite reasonable. It is possible to imagine the system of perfect regulation that Vinge described, and many even like what they see. It is inevitable that an increasingly large part of the Internet will be fed by commerce, and most don't see anything wrong with that either. Indeed, we live in a time (again) when it is commonplace to say: let business take care of things. Let business self-regulate the Net. Net commerce is now the hero.

This book continues Vinge's and Maddox's stories. I share their view of the Net's future; much of this book is about the expanding architecture of regulation that the Internet will become. But I don't share the complacency of the self-congratulatory cheers echoing in the background of that 1996 recording. It was obvious in 1996 who "the enemy" was; now nothing is obvious.

The future is Vinge's and Maddox's accounts together, not either alone. If we were only in for the dystopia described by Vinge, we as a culture would have an obvious and powerful response: Orwell gave us the tools, and Stalin gave us the resolve, to resist the totalitarian state. A spying and invasive Net controlled by Washington is not our future. 1984 is in our past.

And if we were only in for the future that Maddox described, many of our citizens would believe this utopia, not science fiction. A world where "the market" runs free and the evil we call government, defeated, would, for them, be a world of perfect freedom.

But neither story alone describes what the Internet will be. Not Vinge alone, not Maddox alone, but Vinge and Maddox together: a future of control in large part exercised by technologies of commerce, backed by the rule of law.

The challenge of our generation is to reconcile these two forces. How do we protect liberty when the architectures of control are managed as much by the government as by the private sector? How do we assure privacy when the ether perpetually spies? How do we guarantee free thought when the push is to propertize every idea? How do we guarantee self-determination when the architectures of control are perpetually determined elsewhere? How, in other words, do we build a world of liberty when the threats are as Vinge and Maddox together described them?

The answer is not in the knee-jerk antigovernment rhetoric of our past. Reality is harder than fiction; governments are necessary to protect liberty, even if also sufficient to destroy it. But neither does the answer lie in a return to Roosevelt's New Deal. Statism has failed. Liberty is not to be found in some new D.C. alphabet soup (WPA, FCC, FDA, etc.) of bureaucracy.

A second generation takes the ideals of the first and works them out against a different background. It knows the old debates; it has mapped the dead-end arguments of the preceding thirty years. The objective of a second generation is to ask questions that avoid dead-ends and move beyond them.

There is great work out there from both generations. Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow still inspire, and still move on (Dyson is now the temporary chair of an organization some think will become the government of the Internet; Barlow now spends time at Harvard.) And in the second generation, the work of Andrew Shapiro, David Shenk, and Steven Johnson is becoming well known and is compelling.

My aim is this second generation. As fits my profession (I'm a lawyer), my contribution is more long-winded, more obscure, more technical, and more obtuse than the best of either generation. As fits my profession, I'll offer it anyway. In the debates that rage right now, what I have to say will not please anyone very much. And as I peck these last words before e-mailing the manuscript off to the publisher, I can already hear the reactions: "Can't you tell the difference between the power of the sheriff and the power of Walt Disney?" "Do you really think we need a government agency regulating software code?" And from the other side: "How can you argue for an architecture of cyberspace (open source software) that disables government's ability to do good?"

But I am also a teacher. If my writing produces angry reactions, then it might as well affect a more balanced reflection. These are hard times to get it right, but the easy answers to yesterday's debate won't get it right.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 046503912X
• ISBN 13: 9780465039128
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320