BOOK
There's a disarming footnote at the beginning of Lawrence Lessig's massive Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. You can almost see him shrug.
"I'm a law professor," he writes. "I make up hypotheticals for a living."
Of course, the hypotheticals made up by this Harvard lawyer, widely hailed as one of the top legal minds of his generation, have real consequences. A leading intellect of the New Chicago School of economic thought and a pioneer in applying constitutional law to cyberspace, Lessig was appointed in 1998 as the government's "special master" in the Microsoft antitrust case; though a private citizen, he assumed a key role in interpreting issues crucial to that lawsuit's outcome. In Code, Lessig lays out a set of principles to guide legal thinking about the Internet for years to come.
Lessig is neither an information-wants-to-be-free romantic nor a cybercop. In this remarkably clear and elegantly written book, he takes apart many myths about cyberspace and analyzes its underlying architecture - from AOL's power to spy on its users to the last mile of copper coming into your house. Citing the meme that cyberspace "could not be regulated," Lessig notes, "this kind of rhetoric should raise suspicions in any context, and especially here."
Indeed, Lessig argues, it's not just operating systems, as in the Microsoft case, that have an enormous effect on the way millions of people use the Internet. Cyberspace is governed by its architecture and, hence, by its architects. The coders who decide the defaults for privacy, access, and anonymity, he says, are effectively acting as lawmakers on those issues. And, as ecommerce grows, public protections for fair use or privacy increasingly fall into the hands of coders working in the service of private interests. "My strong presumption in most cases is to let the market produce," Lessig writes. "But isn't it absolutely clear that there must be limits on this? That public values are not exhausted by the sum of what IBM might desire?"
Lessig argues convincingly that government must get closer to the machine if democratic values are to be maintained in the digital future. "How the code regulates, who the codewriters are, and who controls the codewriters - these are the questions that any practice of justice must focus on," he writes. "It may well be the case that cyberspace is OK as a company town; but even company towns have constitutional values imposed on them."
Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig: $30. Perseus Books: (800) 386 5656, www.perseusbooks.com.
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