Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace | 
 enlarge | Author: Lawrence Lessig
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
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Media: Paperback
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Pages: 320
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Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0465039138
Dewey Decimal Number: 344
EAN: 9780465039135
ASIN: 0465039138
Publication Date: July 13, 2000
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Amazon.com Review
"We, the Net People, in order to form a more perfect Transfer Protocol..." might be recited in future fifth-grade history classes, says attorney Lawrence Lessig. He turns the now-traditional view of the Internet as an uncontrollable, organic entity on its head, and explores the architecture and social systems that are changing every day and taming the frontier. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is his well-reasoned, undeniably cogent series of arguments for guiding the still-evolving regulatory processes, to ensure that we don't find ourselves stuck with a system that we find objectionable. As the former Communist-bloc countries found, a constitution is still one of our best guarantees against the dark side of chaos; and Lessig promotes a kind of document that accepts the inevitable regulatory authority of both government and commerce, while constraining them within values that we hold by consensus. Lessig holds that those who shriek the loudest at the thought of interference in cyberdoings, especially at the hands of the government, are blind to the ever-increasing regulation of the Net (admittedly, without badges or guns) by businesses that find little opposition to their schemes from consumers, competitors, or cops. The Internet will be regulated, he says, and our window of opportunity to influence the design of those regulations narrows each day. How will we make the decisions that the Framers of our paper-and-ink Constitution couldn't foresee, much less resolve? Lessig proclaims that many of us will have to wake up fast and get to work before we lose the chance to draft a networked Bill of Rights. --Rob Lightner
Product Description
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.
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 Lessig's Code - Foundations for Tomorrow September 9, 2007
Although Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace was a laborious read to me several years ago, it still deserves your attention today. It is basically a legal treatise that feels like a college course. It even has small print! Lessig's thoughts go far beyond scholarly; it is a magnificent work. And even though its content is extremely important, you may not be very enthusiastic about picking it up at first. In it he has posed several questions of constitutional law and its relevance in cyberspace, vividly described the dark blending of government regulation and control with our growing world of electronic commerce.
But Lessig's words are much more poetic:
"We build liberty...by setting society upon a certain constitution...an architecture...that structures and constrains social and legal power, to the end of protecting fundamental values - principles and ideals that reach beyond the compromises of ordinary politics.... There is no reason to believe that the grounding for liberty in cyberspace will simply emerge."
He examines how the relationships of the technology, which he also refers to as 'architecture' or 'code', along with social norms, markets and laws regulate people's behavior and explains how each of these limit individuals' actions. These forces work directly or in combinations where improvements in technology can dramatically alter the constraints on people's conduct. The competition for control continues today under the banner of 'network neutrality' where Congress is being asked by business to decide about who will control the Internet. Network neutrality would return to communications law and regulation the concept of non-discrimination that was always, until recently, part of communications law since the original 1934 Communications Act [and was partially repealed for high speed services]. Not only does big business wants to control the Internet, with recent interpretations of net neutrality they are trying to improve their grip on copyright issues and control who is allowed to innovate in this country. In some cases they have already hijacked the legal system and are misusing our enforcement systems to control dissent.
Historically, AT&T was the telecommunications industry of this country and the 'Big Three' networks controlled the airways until new technologies and innovative regulatory policies broke the hold that these corporations had held onto for so long. Markets, services and competition grew exponentially and the new giants have struggled fiercely since to regain that power that the Bell System once held. With SBC's purchase of what used to be AT&T Longlines, the cycle has come full circle. As Lessig pointed out, the obvious point that many might miss is that when government steps aside, it's not as if private entities have no interests or have no agendas that they pursue. We can't leave the market to regulate the Internet of the future. Our constitutional values check and limit what the markets do also. If you think that no government involvement is the more appropriate path to take, consider Lessig's warning:
"Unless we interrogate the architecture of cyberspace as we interrogate the code of Congress, the relevance of our constitutional tradition will fade and the importance of our commitment to our fundamental values ... will also fade."
Lessig's seminal work will continue to provide the foundation for the evolution of cyberspace law for years to come. My original summary of this book can be found on his website.
Bob Magnant is the author of The Last Transition... - the ultimate Internet adventure, a fact-based novel.
 Important ideas on the future in a wired world November 17, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As it is, I spend a lot of time thinking about systems and issues like architectures, law, policy, and even individual expectations. My 2001 book Developing Trust looked at how we can deal with the policy and technology issues that make our infrastructure trustworthy. Though I dealt with the Internet and Web specifically and showed specific examples of actual failures, some readers have suggested that the discussion was somewhat theoretical, or at the very least, blazing the way for practice instead of reflecting it. My recently-published Brute Force is very different, dealing specifically with the issue of Internet cryptography.
Looking at the fall of the data encryption standard through the lens offered by Lessig's Code is instructive. Consider the state of the world in 1997, when RSA launched its DES Challenge.
As a matter of policy, the U.S. Government promoted a cryptographic standard that would be secure against exhaustive key-search attacks for a relatively short period of time. As a matter of law (in the form of regulation), the Government also limited the strength of the systems that could be exported outside of the United States. As a matter of architecture, the Internet is open and easy to access, in many cases using topologies that will allow anyone in the middle to observe traffic being routed from one system to another. As a matter of expectation, individual Internet users considered their online purchases secured, such that attackers would not be able to intercept and illicitly to use their credit card numbers. As another matter of expectation, many in Congress imagined that even the limited strength of the systems allowed by Government policy were "secure enough."
The DESCHALL Project (and RSA's 1997 DES Challenge that it answered) used architecture to change expectations of both lawmakers and citizens. When it succeeded, law (in this case, the regulation) changed to allow a much freer use and export of cryptographic products. Policy followed, with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) being adopted.
After talking recently with Peter Swire, Esther Dyson, and John Gilmore in Seattle earlier this year at CFP 2005 (with "Panopticon" as its theme), I was reminded of Lessig's Code, in which he argued that it is wrong to imagine as some have that the Internet is inherently impossible to regulate, that it can never be restricted the way that the real world has been.
When I returned from Seattle, I re-read some critical parts of Lessig's book. One part that struck me was its central theme, that four primary forces regulate: law, market, norms, and code.
Limited scope helped to made DESCHALL successful. We didn't seek (directly) to change the law or government policy. The project didn't overreach, attempting to use traditional mechanisms of marketing to affect the expectations (or, in Lessig's words, norms) of individual users. Nor did it preach to the proverbial choir, either in the form of those interested in public policy (law) or those trying to bring their products to international customers who demanded them (market). We were attempting to address an area of architecture (code) that created a vulnerability in the form of an attacker's ability to intercept traffic. While many expected that the issue was addressed through "good enough" cryptography, we used the one tool of our focus (code) to demonstrate that it was out of sync with the demands of the market and the needs to enforce the norms of society.
In the six years since Lessig's book was released, things have changed. Some of the less dramatic changes have come in the form of architecture, the code that implements the global computation and communication infrastructure. Mobile phones and PDAs now have greater utility as gateways to the network and these devices have more tracking capability than in 1999, both in the form of a GPS device to determine the unit's position and in the form of wireless personal area networks such as Bluetooth that have side-effects that can be invasive of privacy.
Norms have not changed significantly; as these deal with the attitudes and expectations of people, norms are always slow to evolve. The market has not changed dramatically for the most part. While a whole dot-com boom and bust took place, the simple fact is that companies that offered good services enabled by the Internet succeeded (eBay and Amazon spring to mind), while those that were using the Internet for its own sake failed-the demand for online haircuts and shoeshines never materialized.
The law is one area where there has been more dramatic change, as local, state, and federal lawmakers strive to update their codes to reflect the world's heavy dependence upon Claude Shannon's binary units. Many laws designed to protect consumers and their digital identities have been passed and now organizations that handle personal information are subjected to civil and criminal penalties for failure to adhere to some norms for protecting information.
Further changes have been ushered in by lawmakers' attempts to show their constituents that they care about the citizenry of this country and are doing all they can to protect them from the threat of terrorist attack. Congress is now debating extension of the Patriot Act and adoption of its successor, Patriot II. In Code, Lessig worries about the impact of law on cyberspace, in particular how regulation will cause infrastructures to be built with new provisions that allow the Government to achive its objective to control its citizenry without being accountable as in a transparent legal system. Given the reaction to the Patriot Act-in particular its provision to search library and bookstore records without a warrant-it would seem that Lessig's concerns have been understood and adopted by a significant number of people working in the area of public policy.
Much of the public debate over digital rights has been in the form of negative reaction to proposed restrictions on personal liberty, privacy, and other rights. Someone proposes that the Patriot Act stay on the books rather then expire (as the Act itself called for as passed in 2001) and people react in the negative. Someone proposes national identification cards for each U.S. citizen and people react in the negative. A cartel proposes a combination of technical and legal standards to limit how consumers can use their products and people react in the negative.
In Code, Lessig argues that society must decide what rights it wants to guarantee, what sort of a society cyberspace is to be, from which implementation in code will follow, shaping both the architecture of the markets and the norms of cyberspace. Despite the passage of six years and the huge number of genuinely bad ideas that have been floated, we have very few good ideas proposed to stave off the flow or influence of the bad. There is very little guidance to show how the Bill of Rights applies in cyberspace. Worse, there is apparently no mechanism by which the government cannot hire private industry to do the work that it, by virtue of the U.S. Constitution, would be forbidden from undertaking. There has been a lot of talking, but remarkably little action, and I suspect that will remain true until there is a clear and concise assertion of what privileges and rights are to be built into cyberspace. As Lessig concludes, if our society fails to take advantage of the opportunity that is now present, liberty will find herself on the losing end of a revolution and it'll be over before any critical mass notices.
Regardless of its style and structure, this is a IMPORTANT book. June 26, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Lawrence Lessig is not a writer, he is a lawyer. Don't expect his book to be easy nor entertaining. However, it is the more insightful writing of its time on the subject of mass media communication and control. For me the strong points are:
1, the Internet has no nature and if you think that it is a place of total freedom, this book will should you how wrong you are.
2, as a counter effect of point 1, the Internet might well become (if not yet) the most powerful element of control on mass population, leaving television and radio their its poor alpha version.
3, Dr Lessig considers the code used to create the Internet as being the laws of cyberspace, showing us the important distinction between between them: code is not something you can oppose to. It is simply a power you are inclined to accept, or put it differently there are *invisible* rules you are *dictated* to follow. That is the theme of the book.
I recommend this book for my Digital Media and New Media students and anyone using the Internet regurlarly and interested in its politics.
 Good overview for outsiders - common sense for many November 20, 2004
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
The premise of Code is that the architecture of the internet and not any one country's laws controls what one can do on it. One clear evidence of architecture controlling our lives is our dependence on cars. Most American cities grew large after the car had become common. Hence they have limited transportation. Hence one is expected to own a car to live a normal life. Similarly the architecture of the internet will make certain activities much easier than others. The difference is the internet is currently being formed and we can choose what we want it to be if we act now (or in 1999 anyway).
Lessig identifies four factors that influence what any individual can and will do on or offline: law, architecture (physics in the real world), social norms, market forces (since corporations have so much control over what gets done). This way of looking at things combined with the cute little diagrams may clarify things you already know about the internet. There is also much discussion threaded through the book of legal issues in the past that may prove applicable to cyberspace now.
Basically I tried to read this, but found it a bit dumbed down. I skimmed it and it was good for me to look closer at some of the relationships in play on the development of the internet, or maybe to solidify things in my head. However it didn't tell me much and Lessig keeps repeating himself blah blah blah and then going into rapturous praise of open source code and newsgroups and other old hat thing on the internet. (I realize that this was published in 1999 but I don't feel that it would have been new info for me then either.)
If you are the sort of person who has read the Jargon File, then you are unlikely to get much out of Code (except if you are interested in legal history about privacy, IP etc - but then again the premise of the book is that architecture more than law influences what can and can't be done online). However, for an outsider interested in learning about the subcultures that exist online and more about the sociology type aspects of computing this would be a useful introduction.
Great book on Cyberspace and a must read for people in the t June 7, 2004
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is another great book that discusses what is going on in cyberspace today (or 1999 when it was written) first by defining cyberspace as a place where we can create personalities and have the ability to speak like we would never do in the real world. The book then goes on to discuss how the internet is regulated or not regulated and what the internet can and should become.The book starts out by discussing multiple forms of regulation and just because technology makes it easier to monitor or regulate does not mean that it is right or legal. The book also discusses what things should be regulated and how and who should regulate it. The next chapters go into Free Speech, Intellectual Property, Privacy and other freedoms we have and should fight to protect. The book talks about Open Source vrs Closed Source software and how regulation can and is added to each. One of the solutions of the book is to offer transparent regulation that allows user to know what is regulated. This is possible and is happening now in Open Source software but is not happening in closed source software. This is an excellent book that should help call us to action that will help provide the right kind of regulation while ensuring our freedoms or not reduced. This is a great book and I would recommend it..
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