Code : And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0

Countering the common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated, Lessig (Harvard Law School) argues that if anything, commerce is forging the Internet into a highly regulated domain. But neither direction is inevitable; it is up to citizens to decide what values and trade-offs of control hardware and software code is to embody. Should cyberspace be regulated? How can it be done? It's a cherished belief of techies and net denizens everywhere that cyberspace is fundamentally impossible to regulate. Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig warns that, if we're not careful we'll wake up one day to discover that the character of cyberspace has changed from under us. Cyberspace will no longer be a world of relative freedom; instead it will be a world of perfect control where our identities, actions, and desires are monitored, tracked, and analyzed for the latest market research report. Commercial forces will dictate the change, and architecturethe very structure of cyberspace itselfwill dictate the form our interactions can and cannot take. Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace is an exciting examination of how the core values of cyberspace as we know itintellectual property, free speech, and privacy-are being threatened and what we can do to protect them. Lessig shows how codethe architecture and law of cyberspacecan make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms. Code is not just for lawyers and policymakers; it is a must-read for everyone concerned with survival of democratic values in the Information Age. 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, first published in 2000, 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 oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable space, where 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. Since its original publication, this seminal book has earned the status of a minor classic. This second edition, or Version 2.0, has been prepared through the author's wiki, a web site that allows readers to edit the text, making this the first reader-edited revision of a popular book. Although the book is named Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig uses this theme sparingly. It is a fairly simple concept: since cyberspace is entirely human-made, there are no natural laws to determine its architecture. While we tend to assume that what is in cyberspace is a given, in fact everything there is a construction based on decisions made by people. What we can and can't do there is governed by the underlying code of all of the programs that make up the Internet, which both permit and restrict. So while the libertarians among us rail against the idea of government, our freedoms in cyberspace are being determined by an invisible structure that is every bit as restricting as any laws that can come out of a legislature, legitimate or not. Even more important, this invisible code has been written by people we did not elect and who have no formal obligations to us, such as the members of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the more recently-developed Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It follows that what we will be able to do in the future will be determined by code that will be written tomorrow, and we should be thinking about who will determine what this code will be. [from http://kcoyle.net/lessig.html] None None Code Is Law Four Puzzles from Cyberspace "REGULABILITY" Is-Ism: Is the Way It Is the Way It Must Be? Architectures of Control Regulating Code REGULATION BY CODE Cyberspaces What Things Regulate The Limits in Open Code LATENT AMBIGUITIES Translation Intellectual Property Privacy Free Speech Interlude COMPETING SOVEREIGNS Sovereignty Competition Among Sovereigns RESPONSES The Problems We Face Responses What Declan Doesn't Get None None None "Code counters the common belief that cyberspace cannot be controlled or censored. To the contrary, under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable world where behavior will be much more tightly controlled than in real space."--Cover Discusses cyberspace as a social community that is separate but built upon the Internet