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. 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.
And the discussion wouldn’t be complete without Lawrence Lessig himself, who will respond to his critics and offer his own assessment of where things stand, ten years after his remarkable book.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. We’ve invited Internet law experts Jonathan Zittrain and Adam Thierer to comment as well each has a somewhat different perspective on the future of the Internet and how best to preserve its free and creative character. It seemed fitting, then, to invite Declan McCullagh to help re-assess what Lessig and others were predicting at the time. In 2009, Code turns ten years old, and it is just as relevant as ever. His provocative final chapter was entitled “What Declan Doesn’t Get” it called out journalist Declan McCullagh as just the type of over-optimistic cyberlibertarian who didn’t appreciate these growing threats.
He warned that without carefully constructed regulations, corporate and other special interests stood to capture the online experience - with results that would be anything but free. In the original Code, Lessig was at pains to distance himself from cyberlibertarians although he championed a relatively permissive regulatory regime for the Internet, Lessig insisted on the importance of politics in shaping this new area of human action. (We’d be remiss if we failed to point out that Lessig helped pioneer the very idea of “open source” distribution.) A book this important will always draw both defenders and critics, and Lessig himself has gone as far as to produce a free, open-source revision of the text, entitled Code Version 2.0. Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is widely regarded as one of the foundational texts of Internet law.
0 kommentar(er)
