The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

But a dark thought always lurked in the recesses of my mind: What will happen when "Big Money" wakes up to the power of the Web? I luridly imagined mega-corporations somehow buying up the Web, tying up content, and crying up to Big Brother when they didn't get their way.

Those days seem to be closer than I ever imagined.

That's what I learned in this intricately arresting book by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. It's an exultant yet sobering look at how the nature of the Internet sparked a new age of innovation--and how this is now seriously threatened. As Lessig writes:

"The original Net protected fundamental aspects of innovation. End-to-end meant new ideas were protected; open code meant innovation would not be attacked; free distribution meant new ways of connecting would be assured. These protections were largely architectural. This architecture is now changing. And as it changes, as with the threats to liberty, there is a threat here to innovation."

Lessig's purpose is awaken us to our untested belief in the value of control over commons before the Net is swallowed up.

The Future of Ideas is nicely structured to that end--but you'll need to strap on your thinking cap before you dive in. Lessig is unrelentingly brilliant and his text is richly loaded with concepts you may never have considered

He begins by introducting the concept of "commons"--most simply defined as a resource held freely in common for the overall good of society. He helps us understand that concept by repeatedly referring to the public roads and highways--they are held in common, we have free access to them, they bring value where they exist.

He then takes this idea of commons and beautifully demonstrates how the Internet rapidly emerged as a new commons for innovation. Against the historical backdrop of controlled innovation that he calls the "dark ages" (well typified by AT&T's former stranglehold over U.S. telecommunications), Lessig shows us how the Web provides a gloriously free field for innovation and ideas--something undeniable in light of its impact over the last several years.

He then explains--in what I found by far the most interesting part of the book--how the nature of the Internet itself, at its physical, code and content layers, created, enabled and empowered this new commons of innovation. I learned things I'd never known about the Net and felt that familiar leap of heart at what the Web could bring.

The book then takes a dark turn as Lessig explains how each layer of the Net is falling under systems of control--systems that threaten to take away the values, norms and architecture of the Net that make it such a free field for innovation. Behind this are the usual culprits--mega-corporations aided and abetted by politicians and the courts. The result is that the commons of the Net is seriously threatened.

But that's only part of the tale Lessig tells. He explains:

"The larger story here is not about dark forces. It is about a blindness that affects our political culture generally. We have been so captured by the ideals of property and control that we don't even see the benefits from resources not perfectly controlled.... This is not a conspiracy. It is a cultural blindness."

In short, it's a story about us, We the People, who are unquestioningly letting Big Money and Big Government erode the freedoms and commons of the Net.

Lessig concludes with some practical, common-sense and challenging recommendations to stop the growing avalanche. Yet the final chapter is chilling, Lessig's closing even more so:

"We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control--without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it."

Want to do something about it? You can begin by reading this book.


An Important Book For Our Time   November 25, 2001
Ron Dwyer (Chicago, Illinois)
26 out of 28 found this review helpful

This book should be at least a candidate for the National Book Award. It is, I believe, an important book for our time. The author, Lawrence Lessig, according to the book's jacket, is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School; once a clerk for Judge Richard Posner; and is a board member of the Red Hat Center for Open Source, among other things. So he has the knowledge, experience, and judgment to write such a book.
What is the main concern of the book? Let me try to put it in this fundamental way: How do we want the Internet to develop? How do we create the conditions necessary to maximize the creative potential of the Internet and, for that matter, any new electronic technology?
These concerns leads us to the consider the laws that we have now--especially the patent and copyright laws, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the anti-trust laws.
I am familiar with some theoreticians who hold that there should not be any patent and copyrights at all. This is one extreme view, which the author does not hold. I believe that there has to be adequate reward to the innovator, and copyright and patents--which indeed does grant a limited monopoly--does that.
However, the author argues that the current laws that we have today go too far in the other extreme. These laws he argues hinder future creativeness. The laws we have today, he says, will lead to a future where "take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things and that's pretty much it." (page 7) But the future can be better and greater than this, in ways we cannot fathom now.
It seems to me that concerning copyrights and patents, a utilitarian standard should apply: Pursue the policy that maximizes wealth in society as a whole. Granting patents and copyrights does that--for in the very fact of doing that--it gives a signal to members of society that innovation will be rewarded. However, perhaps the length of these copyrights and patents are too long.
After a patent expires, others copy or modify the original product--as can be seen in the case of prescription drugs--which thus increases the supply of such a good, and thus lowers its price. Consumers benefit.
Reducing copyright and patent protection would not only have this immediate economic beneit to consumers, but it would have the long-term impact of promoting creativity.
The author, argues, for example, that, concerning computer software, he would "protect software for only five years, renewable once. But that protection would be granted only if the author submitted a copy of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed copy would be publicly available from the US Copyright Office server." (page 253)
Ideas like this are anathema to some companies. But if we had such a policy in place, I can readily imagine a reality where there would be less market dominanace by a few companies, and the innovation rate of software would have been better.
Of course, as with any author, one can disagree here and there. The author seems to side with Napster, for instance. I do think that the courts ruled correctly in that case. As the saying goes, "If you don't like the law, you take it to your congressman." Or to the reading public, who hopefully will influence public policy.


Pessimism, with an Optimistic Bent   March 18, 2002
Christopher D. Helmkamp (Falls Church, VA)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

The author of this great new book about ideas in the age of technology is no college kid touting, "I have a right to, like, copy MP3s!" On the contrary, Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's book provides a balanced, logical, and realistic argument for more careful Copywright and Intellectual Property legislation. In fewer than 300 pages, Lessig not only lays out the history of IP law, but also thoroughly examines the current move towards corporate favoritism.

This makes for a very discouraging read; however, the reader is left with plenty of ideas about how IP law could be shaped in the future. Lessig's suggestions would go a long way towards protecting innovation while still upholding the core principles of fair use and reasonable limits the Founding Fathers wrote into the US Constitution. (Buy a copy of this book for your Congressman!)

Lessig, a Liberal who clerked for the popular Conservative Circuit Court Judge and prolific public intellectual Richard Posner, also demonstrates why this issue cuts right across standard ideological lines. Even if you only read chapters 4 and 11, I highly reccomend this book for a thorough examination of this most pressing issue of current public policy.


Another excellent insight into our digital futur   November 5, 2001
Sebastien Pigeon (Town of Mont-Royal, Quebec Canada)
31 out of 37 found this review helpful

Nothing short of a best seller, this book will certainly become as popular as "Code and other Laws of Cyberspace".

This time, Pr Lessig takes us on a tour of the world of intellectual property law and cyberspace. With great strength, the book induces a profound reflection on what intellectual property should and should not be. One of the major arguments developed throughout the book is that some resources should be free (not as in free beer, but as in free speech) and that such "freedom" is the only way to have innovation. The main example of this theory: the Internet. Build on open code and with open access, the Internet is the perfect example of how the freedom of the resource induces creativity on a large scale. This creativity boom is now threatened by the extension of copyright into the digital world.

Attacking strongly what copyright and intellectual property law has become, the author points out that the content industry has, in an effort to protect it's market, defined what we could and what we will be able to do with "our" music.

For the copyright lawyers, this book will be an occasion to think about the effects our practice has on everyone's life and liberty. Pr Lessig is right. Several new copyright legislation go to far and procure a level of control over content and use that was never meant to exist.

For the non-lawyer, the book is accessible and well written. Pr Lessig makes his case by storytelling and by numerous examples, which should allow a large public to appreciate and understand the nature of the fight between content user and content producer.

Get this book ... it's worth every minute of your time !


A brilliant finale to _Code And Other Laws Of Cyberspace_   January 23, 2002
Stephen R. Laniel (Cambridge, MA USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

The Future Of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig established his credentials as a civil libertarian and Internet advocate a few years ago with _Code And Other Laws Of Cyberspace_, his brilliant and vastly important work about the world of complete control toward which the Internet is converging. _Code_ was a highly pessimistic portrayal of the legal and corporate infrastructure that would eventually lead the Internet - in Lessig's view - to be a masterpiece of control more evil than George Orwell ever could have imagined.

Lessig's argument in _Code_ was manifold, but one of its most important points was that we miss the real bad guys if we focus all our attention on removing government regulation from the Internet. Control can come from many directions: corporations can control us, social norms can, and so can the government. From the Founding Fathers until now, we have focused all our energy on weakening the government, while beefing up the private sector. In _Code_, Lessig showed us that the chickens are coming to roost: we're careening toward a thoroughly controlled world in which corporations will be able to know everything about us, because we have placed our entire personas inside a world that is as malleable as computer code.

There is no ``nature" of cyberspace, said Lessig in _Code_: the Internet is nothing more or less than the code that controls it. The Net is not ``by its very nature" unregulable, because it has no nature - it merely has code. In fact, Lessig goes on to show that we can expect a world of more regulation, not less, as the Net becomes more and more dominated by commerce.

In The Future Of Ideas, Lessig focuses his energy on a different, but nonetheless still very important aspect of the Internet's development: the Old Guard's habit of constraining innovation. The point has been made before in varied contexts related to the Net. Jessica Litman's book Digital Copyright argued that copyright holders tend to stomp on new technologies because the latter normally don't have powerful interests behind them and the former do. (E.g., the Betamax copyright-infringement case in the 1980's.) Lessig goes further, showing that in many different cases (copyright-related and otherwise) the Old Guard have restricted innovation to the point that the Internet of the future will be just like every old technology. We'll get television all over again.

Lessig starts with his ideal, which many civil libertarians and hackers share: an Internet of totally open-source software and end-to-end (e2e) network design. Throughout the book, he shows why corporations - behaving, from their perspective, in a totally honest and right-headed way - are straying from that ideal into a world of more copyright restrictions, less openness, and more control. In many ways, this book is a continuation of _Code_, this time focusing on specific aspects of the future that Lessig foresaw in the earlier work. As with _Code_, _The Future Of Ideas_ is pessimistic, stating in strong terms that it expects nightmarish visions of the future to come true.

Much of the ground that Lessig covers here has been dealt with in greater detail elsewhere. For instance, Litman's book Digital Copyright is a great introduction both to the history of copyright and to its future. But few books tackle the expanse of material that _The Future Of Ideas_ discusses. Lessig covers everything from spectrum auctions to content licensing to patents to trademarks to copyrights, all while keeping his eye on the general notion that the laws have moved quickly out of our hands. As Litman pointed out in Digital Copyright, and as Lessig reiterates here, the few people who understand copyright law are all copyright lawyers. Those who must live in the law's shadow - ordinary citizens - have no idea what copyright law says, and when presented with incoherent copyright law, their first instinct is to say, ``It couldn't possibly say what you say it says." The law has moved past the point where citizens could control it.

While he's at it, Lessig manages to keep his head about him. He clearly has a well-formed opinion on the topics he covers, yet he manages to structure the book as a series of questions. Lessig suggests that a society is defined by the questions it doesn't ask - the ones it takes for granted. So during his analysis of electronic-law issues, he tries to get us to question things that we've forgotten were even questions to begin with - questions like whether more control is always better, whether more privatization of resources is always a good idea, and so on. And throughout his discussion, he manages to keep the discussion coherent: he has a few guiding themes, and his discussions of electronic law keep returning to those themes.

The result is a remarkably readable book that should worry anyone who has an interest in the future of the electronic world. Little of the material in _The Future Of Ideas_ will be new to Slashdot readers, but there is probably no single book that ties this issues together as well as this one does. The overall evil that it reveals is worth paying attention to.