Rating: 
Summary: Good historical and future views, but neglects the present
Review: Rather than just looking at what the intellectual property law is today, he does an excellent job of framing what all of the different types of intellectual property are, how they were intended to be protected (or not!) by the framers of the Constitution, and where we've strayed since then. He provides a very interesting and compelling argument that much of the direction we're headed in today is being forced by corporations who really should be doing that sort of thing -- it's in their charter! However, he points out that it's the responsibility of the people and the government to take actions to ensure a level playing field where people can still make major, field-shattering innovations. It's a great argument, and one that I highly recommend reading through and thinking hard about.Unfortunately, he doesn't talk much about what kinds of innovation DO happen in the current model (in the large), and how it contrasts with the kinds of innovation that happen in the other model (in the small) that he wants to try to enforce. The implication is that it's as little as possible while maintaining status quo, but that seems hard to believe. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
Rating: 
Summary: Pessimism, with an Optimistic Bent
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A genuinely important book!
Review: The fate of free expression in cyberspace hangs in the balance, avers Lessig (Law/Stanford Univ.; Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace, not reviewed), who offers practical advice to save it. From his opening rally-"The forces that the original Internet threatened to transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet"-Lessig offers a timely polemic against the sterilization of cyberspace. Created both as a venue for the quick dissemination of information and above all as a fiercely open medium, cyberspace, he argues, now suffers from innumerable and insuperable barriers created by corporate interests to protect their dominance. Maneuvering through a twisted thicket of scientific and legal arcane, his prose and reasoning could not be clearer or more passionate. He even makes computer wiring somewhat comprehensible for the layperson: no small achievement. Using concrete examples from daily life, Lessig clarifies such complex issues as intellectual property in cyberspace by providing a historical overview of relevant legal cases from player-piano rolls to cable TV to Napster. Although intellectual property laws are essential to protect the rights of creators, at what point does the protection of authorial rights unnecessarily cripple the public discourse? Why can people hang a poster of the Simpsons on their walls but not on their web pages? One of the major threads of Lessig's argument is the inherent lunacy of applying "real world" laws to cyberspace, as when eBay sued a rival for trespass because they "illegally entered" its site. For Lessig, the cyberspace commons as intellectual playground and societal gathering place must be preserved, lest we soon feel the stultifying effect of sterility drowning what should be a rowdy and polyphonic discourse. The author closes with a reserved homage to US Senator Orrin Hatch, a politician who (perhaps unexpectedly) seeks to preserve the freedoms of the Internet. Part manifesto, part jeremiad, but all essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of creative freedom in cyberspace.
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Summary: A brilliant finale to _Code And Other Laws Of Cyberspace_
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A very important book
Review: The Future of Ideas is one of the most important books on Internet development and the fate of the commons. Lessig's predictions for the future of Internet are indeed scaring and it is important that there is a debate on in what direction(s) we want the Internet to develop. Lessig's user perspective of the problems regarding the commons of the Net makes this book stand out from other books on the same topic. Lessig's opinions are always underpinned by huge amounts of empirical data. This book deserves to be read and discussed by all those who are interested in Internet development in a broad sense.
Rating: 
Summary: So-so
Review: This book is not bad. The author's opinion is clear-cut and provoking. But, I don't think he need to use 352 pages to support his idea. Though in fact, the facts that he shows are important to support his idea, many people feel familiar with those facts.
Rating:
Summary: An Important Book For Our Time
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Definitive Work But at times too thin
Review: This is a definitive work in the area of copyright disputes in a digital era. It is a great demonstration how corporate america interests have distorted the democratic society and how as a culture our rules our laws and our code frequently are biased to corporate profit over humans and life itself. The book demonstrates how this leads to absurd results that in the end, instead of creating an incentive for intellectual work in fact curtail the discourse. HOWEVER, Lessig relies far too much on his research assistants and it is at times transparent. Some chapters read as if they were written by entirely different people. Chapters contradict themselves saying at one place that the FCC MUST step up and solve the open access debate and in another that the FCC is the problem and should get out of the way. Some chapters clearly rely on only a few primary sources and do not reflect the full policy dialogue. In some areas the thought is clearly well developed and mature, and in others, such as communications law, the work is simply inadequate.
Rating:
Summary: Important book for IP lawyers and internet architects
Review: This is the best of Lessig's books that I've read so far. Lessig is one of the more articulate spokespersons for the movement to protect the public domain, which includes such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, etc., although he may be more moderate in his views than some. In this book, Lessig does a great job explaining why the Internet became what it is (or at least what it was in 1999 or 2000). Ultimately the success of the Internet resulted from the fact that no one was in control... But his most important message is that corporate interests don't necessary like what it is, and are using their considerable powers to change it into something more useful to them. This isn't because these companies are evil - their approach is completely rational and legitimate. However, their interests and the interests of the public probably don't coincide here. The only way to ensure that future control and/or regulation properly balances public and corporate interests is to have an informed public. Professor Lessig's book is a great start.
Rating:
Summary: Important book for IP lawyers and internet architects
Review: This is the best of Lessig's books that I've read so far. Lessig is one of the more articulate spokespersons for the movement to protect the public domain, which includes such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, etc., although he may be more moderate in his views than some. In this book, Lessig does a great job explaining why the Internet became what it is (or at least what it was in 1999 or 2000). Ultimately the success of the Internet resulted from the fact that no one was in control... But his most important message is that corporate interests don't necessary like what it is, and are using their considerable powers to change it into something more useful to them. This isn't because these companies are evil - their approach is completely rational and legitimate. However, their interests and the interests of the public probably don't coincide here. The only way to ensure that future control and/or regulation properly balances public and corporate interests is to have an informed public. Professor Lessig's book is a great start.
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