 | |
| Author | Lawrence Lessig |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Basic Books |
Publication date | 1999 |
| Pages | 297 |
| ISBN | 0-465-03912-X |
| OCLC | 43836713 |
| Followed by | The Future of Ideas |
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a 1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on the structure and nature of regulation of the Internet.
The primary idea of the book, as expressed in the title, is the notion that computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does. [1] More generally, Lessig argues that there are actually four major regulators (Law, Norms, Market, Architecture) each of which has a profound impact on society and whose implications must be considered (sometimes called the "pathetic dot theory", after the "dot" that is constrained by these regulators.)
The book includes a discussion of the implications for copyright law, arguing that cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law to protect against illegal copying. It goes so far as to argue that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use. [2] If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use. The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples in the book show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against "unlimited copying."
The Future of Ideas is a continuation of Code's analysis of copyright, where Lessig argues that too much long term copyright protection hampers the creation of new ideas based on existing works, and advocates the importance of existing works entering the public domain quickly. [3]
In March 2005, Lessig launched the Code V.2 Wiki to update the book with current information, which he then adapted into a second edition of the book, Code: Version 2.0 , in 2006. [4]
The book has been widely cited, and Lessig has repeatedly achieved top places on lists of most-cited law school faculty. [5] [6] It has been called "the most influential book to date about law and cyberspace", [7] "seminal", [8] and in a critical essay on the book's 10th anniversary, author Declan McCullagh (subject of the chapter "What Declan Doesn't Get") said it was "difficult to overstate the influence" of the book. [9]
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another right holder, the exclusive and legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Criticism of copyright, or anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critics often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of the policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like fair use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself.
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2001) is a book by Lawrence Lessig, at the time of writing a professor of law at Stanford Law School, who is well known as a critic of the extension of the copyright term in US. It is a continuation of his previous book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which is about how computer programs can restrict freedom of ideas in cyberspace.
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004.
Remix culture, also known as read-write culture, is a term describing a culture that allows and encourages the creation of derivative works by combining or editing existing materials. Remix cultures are permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of other creators. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released a variety of licenses as tools to promote remix culture, as remixing is legally hindered by the default exclusive copyright regime applied on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.
Michael Allen Geist is a Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of four books on copyright law and privacy law, and he edits two newsletters on Canadian information technology and privacy law.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Pamela Samuelson is an American legal scholar, activist, and philanthropist. She is the Richard M. Sherman '74 Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1996. She holds a joint appointment at the UC Berkeley School of Information. She is a co-founder of Authors Alliance and a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
The Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference is an annual academic conference held in the United States or Canada about the intersection of computer technology, freedom, and privacy issues. The conference was founded in 1991, and since at least 1999, it has been organized under the aegis of the Association for Computing Machinery. It was originally sponsored by CPSR.
Jessica Litman is a leading intellectual property scholar. She has been ranked as one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw.
Cyberethics is "a branch of ethics concerned with behavior in an online environment". In another definition, it is the "exploration of the entire range of ethical and moral issues that arise in cyberspace" while cyberspace is understood to be "the electronic worlds made visible by the Internet." For years, various governments have enacted regulations while organizations have defined policies about cyberethics.
Information technology law, also known as information, communication and technology law or cyberlaw, concerns the juridical regulation of information technology, its possibilities and the consequences of its use, including computing, software coding, artificial intelligence, the internet and virtual worlds. The ICT field of law comprises elements of various branches of law, originating under various acts or statutes of parliaments, the common and continental law and international law. Some important areas it covers are information and data, communication, and information technology, both software and hardware and technical communications technology, including coding and protocols.
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is Lawrence Lessig's fifth book. The book was made available for free download and remixing under the CC BY-NC Creative Commons license via Bloomsbury Academic. It is still available via the Internet Archive. It details a hypothesis about the societal effect of the Internet, and how this will affect production and consumption of popular culture to a "remix culture".
Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age is a non-fiction book about cyberlaw, written by free speech lawyer Mike Godwin. It was first published in 1998 by Times Books. It was republished in 2003 as a revised edition by The MIT Press. Godwin graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1990 and was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Written with a first-person perspective, Cyber Rights offers a background in the legal issues and history pertaining to free speech on the Internet. It documents the author's experiences in defending free speech online, and puts forth the thesis that "the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech". Godwin emphasizes that decisions made about the expression of ideas on the Internet affect freedom of speech in other media as well, as granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The pathetic dot theory or the New Chicago School theory was introduced by Lawrence Lessig in a 1998 article and popularized in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. It is a socioeconomic theory of regulation. It discusses how lives of individuals are regulated by four forces: the law, social norms, the market, and architecture.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley who teaches information privacy law, computer crime law, regulation of online privacy, internet law, and seminars on new technology. Hoofnagle has contributed to the privacy literature by writing privacy law legal reviews and conducting research on the privacy preferences of Americans. Notably, his research demonstrates that most Americans prefer not to be targeted online for advertising and despite claims to the contrary, young people care about privacy and take actions to protect it. Hoofnagle has written scholarly articles regarding identity theft, consumer privacy, U.S. and European privacy laws, and privacy policy suggestions.
In internet governance, network sovereignty, also called digital sovereignty or cyber sovereignty, is the effort of a governing entity, such as a state, to create boundaries on a network and then exert a form of control, often in the form of law enforcement over such boundaries.
Dennis S. Karjala was an American intellectual property law professor at Arizona State University. His major interests in teaching and research were primarily in the area of intellectual property, specifically in copyright and its applications in digital technologies. His work in the field of intellectual property was internationally recognized and complemented by his ease in speaking and writing in Japanese.
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