Code: And Other Laws of CyberspaceThere'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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American architecture argued argument Avatar space balance chapter choice citizens Clipper Chip Coast Code code writers commerce Congress constitutional constraint context copy copyright law cost Court Cryptography cyberspace democracy described disabled effect Electronic enable encryption example federal filtering Fourth Amendment framers free speech government's Hal Abelson Harvard idea important individuals intellectual property Internet Jake John Perry Barlow Larry Lessig latent ambiguity Law Journal Law Review Lawrence Lessig lawyers Lessig liberty limited live machine ment monitoring norms open code open source Pamela Samuelson Pentagon Papers political porn Post problem protection protocol question real space real-space regime require rules sense server simply social story structures TCP/IP threat tion Transparent Society trusted systems users values visited May 30 Yochai Benkler York