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Summary: Understanding is the first task.
Review: "Code" falls in the middle between euphoria and alarm. However, Lessig fails to complete the circle and I have to wonder why. There will be a digital economy that will eliminate both anonymous currency and privacy, it will be hailed as a boon to public safety and welfare because it will eliminate many societal ills as well. I believe this is going to happen. The only author who has stated so with conviction and credibility is Jerry Furland, author of Transfer-the end of the beginning.
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Summary: Excellent insights into Internet law
Review: "Code" provides an excellent discussion of the interaction and tensions between technology and the law.The author, Lawrence Lessig, is a well-known Harvard law professor. He discusses important Internet law issues, such as intellectual property, privacy and free speech. He also helps explain the book's title: "I think we need better code (in the sense of West Coast code, software) rather than more code (in the sense of East Coast code, laws), with the exception of one bit of East Coast code: a clear statement about who owns... [personal] 'data.' If the law were clear that this data was the property of individuals, and others needed to negotiate to get it, then we would create the incentives for much better code to be developed to protect and facilitate individual choice."
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Summary: Brilliant
Review: As a law student studying communications and internet law I found this to be a fascinating book. It challanges the assumptions we make about the future of free information and unregulated networks. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Towards a Constitution for Cyberspace
Review: Can Cyberspace be regulated? Is it naturally immune to government influence? Lessig argues (powerfully) that although it cannot be regulated in its present form, it is inevitable that that form will change, and fairly quickly, due to a combination of commercial pressure, strong digital signature technology, willing sacrifice of privacy by individuals in the name of convenience (similar to the way most of us now routinely accept cookies), and some help from the government. That is, given a strong digital signature technology, people will willingly accept it because companies will insist on it to do most serious transactions online, and government will support this -- with all sorts of attendant consequences. Lessig doesn't advocate this change -- he argues that it is happening and can't be stopped -- but he is concerned about its impact on intellectual propery, privacy, free speech, and effectiveness of local government. There are several different ways the new system might treat each of these areas, but some of those are much less attractive than others, and he argues that we must be actively involved -- now -- if we are to have any influence on which way things go. Lessig further argues that government is not the only agency that can take people's liberty away. Technology, cultural norms, and the market are all capable of doing this too, and he is especially concerned that allowing the ultimate structure of cyberspace to be dictated by commercial entities may result in a world with much less freedom than most of us would care to imagine -- and that neither our courts nor our legislatures as currently constituted is prepared to influence the outcome in a major way. To prevent that, we, the people, need to be actively involved in building the new cybernetic world -- in a way we haven't been since the US Constitution was drafted. More of law book that a technical one, Lessig is nevertheless thoroughly readable, and his many illustrations with stories both in and out of cyberspace make it entertaining throughout. This is a very important book.
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Summary: Worth the time, if you are interested.
Review: Code is a challenging book to read. Lessig frequently uses complicated devices such as allegorical stories, figurative examples, and conceptual theories to support his arguments. While the author has made an effort to introduce legal concepts discussed in his book, my background of spending a semester studying the First Amendment and the Constitution was required for comprehending the topics in Code. The value of this book is the insight it can provide anyone with intermediate knowledge of Constitutional law and an interest in the Internet.
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Summary: Beautiful Style
Review: I am impressed with the ease of reading of this book. Also Lessig repeats himself constantly. It is very easy to get at what he is saying. Mind you this a law course text book and the laws are American which are only obliquely useful to us Canadians.
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Summary: the most influential book for the internet age
Review: I am not understating it when I say that this book has profoundly changed the way I look at the world. Lessig's perspective as a constitutional law scholar gives him profound insight into the fundamental structures of the world we live in, and how the internet is working to change it in ways we couldn't have imagined ten years ago and can't even imagine now. I am awestruck -- if I could write a book that's 10% as smart as his, I'd be really happy.
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Summary: Future of the Internet and Democracy
Review: I did the Japanese translation of this book. It was quite an amazing book. First, Lessig argues that commerce and the government will try to turn Internet into a regulable place, and in order to do so, they will rely on changing the code (or protocol) of the Internet. Now, regulation through code is problematic, because it is TOO good. If its a law or some regulation, you can intentionally choose to disobey it, or rebel against it. With code, you can't do that. He says that this is bad, because a lot of good things in this world depend on the fact that you can't enforce certain laws too strictly. That's where some part of freedom relies on. If regulation becomes too strict, we're doomed. So, we have to do something about it. We have to force people to create "incomplete" code!! This is the very surprising conclusion of this book. You really should read this, because it sounds too crazy at first glance. And then, the book becomes even better. He starts discussing who would actually take the trouble to do that kind of thing. And he starts discussing how we should restore the democratic process, and how we are in a process of becoming a world citizen! It's a book with an amazing scope, dealing with much more than the title suggests. And it's not just some sort of a fairy tale, it's a problem that's facing us as we speak. A lot of people talk about the Internet changing the world, when all they actually talk about is making some petty cash. Not this book. This book will persuade you that the Internet WILL and IS really changing the world. After this book, you're Net crawling will never be the same.
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Summary: Theorizing the Internet
Review: In CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig presents some alternatives to the libertarianism of the "digerati." At the same time, I looked in this book in vain for discussion of how deeply the Internet changes the rules. Lessig does not speak at all to two legal "code" issues. They are the problems of "meta-regulation" and the way in which cyberspace cannot map, fully, "conceptual" space. Lessig takes it for granted, as against a sort of pessimistic libertarianism, that we can regulate cyberspace. The pessimistic libertarian despairs of being able to do this. The real reason for regulatory pessimism may be the Turing halting problem, the result in abstract computer science that in general no Turing machine (a mathematical model of the essential characteristics of all possible digital computers) can tell whether another halts. This result means that it is not always possible to use a Turing machine to predict the behavior of another Turing machine. A static "dumb" text can be investigated for keywords indicating pornography. Common solutions don't address the quoting problem and for this reason speech that "mentions" but does not "use" the keywords will be treated identically as speech that uses the key words. This exerts a "chilling effect" on critical discussion that describes pornography or other illegal conduct by quoting the "bad" texts. Most perniciously, and most reminiscent of the way in which Alan Turing proved the unsolvability of the halting problem, this text monitor will very possibly highlight its very own text and similar texts. When I was working as a programmer at Princeton university I suggested a program that would examine our network for "politically incorrect" words including the classic cuss words. One of my coworkers was shocked to learn that my program's source would have to include the offending words and if I were to transfer this code across the network, it would flag its own text. If the code is the law, thouight and care has to be given to the writing of even trivial code: this does not happen now. Lessig favors open code which overcomes the pragmatic fact that it is impossible to write a provably correct large program, by forcing a social review of the source code. Neither writers of closed nor of open source code, today, resemble attorneys or even legislators. Furthermore, writers of the closed source live under an ideological regime, first named by the sociologist Phillip Kraft in 1978, in Kraft's landmark book, Programmers and Their Managers. Kraft notes that the ongoing training of computer programmers is not only technical it is also ideological, and slanted heavily towards private, business needs. In modern day technical and training documentation, a sort of "binary opposition" is made between the business architecture of a data system and its more technical implementation. This binary opposition has two effects. One is to privilege the business side. Derrida was perhaps the first philosopher to note that the creation, in our thought, of binary oppositions such as male/female tends not to equal and fair treatment, cognitively or ethically, of the two terms. Instead it tends to favor one of the terms. This binary opposition sharply favors the business side. Documentation of systems describes elements as "business objects" even when these "objects" are used for not-for-profit ends. This infects the ideology of working computer professionals with something like Charles Wilson of General Motors' hegemonic philosophy: "what's good for General Motors is good for the country." Part of the problem is the United States legal system and the way it withholds, from working writers of the code, the ability to make management decisions while at the same time forcing those code writers to make the decisions (typically in the server room at 3:00 AM.) This regime (which is a result of the 1948 Taft-Hartley act) means that code writers who wish to be compensated fairly must assert ownership in code, and it means that Open Source may be a detour and frolic. Lessig does not think in the terms of legal criticism: he uses instead our Constitution as a final authority. This means that he has to accept the current industrial system of producing code as the best of all possible words. But in this actual process there is a considerable amount of sheer waste, a considerable amount of politics and a considerable amount of abuse. This situation is gradually destroying another sort of "space" which is not mentioned in the book at all, and this is the space of theory itself. A German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, identified this space which I can only describe as a shared conceptual, ethical and even aesthetic space. He called the contents of this space "ideas" but stressed throughout his career that he was not a psychologist and these ideas were not in our minds. The problem with code may be that it reifies and even deadens the contents of conceptual space and transfers it into cyberspace. A very interesting example is in a surprising location, for Rutgers computer scientist Steven Skiena's book The Algorithm Design Manual (Springer 1998) reproduces a modern sentencing guideline, such as may be found in a judge's spreadsheet, for various levels of theft and robbery. Skiena shows how the very reification of the sentencing guidelines, which were supposed to redress the presumably bad consequences of judicial discretion, results in a significant bias: for the sentencing guidelines make the penalties high for small robberies and low for large thefts. This places a class bias against the poor (likely to commit the small crimes) and in favor of white-collar criminals. It's an example of code acting silently as law. The answer lies in creating a programming profession not as tied to industrial needs.
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Summary: BOOOOO !!!! Thumbs Down, I hate this book
Review: It is the worse piece of literature that I have ever read. I was made to read it for a college assignment. It has microscopic type. It is not reader friendly and the author is a warped sense of organization. He is totally confused and needs to read his own book. He goes North, South, East and west in every chapter. You have no idea what his actual opinion is. He totally ...! I'm sorry for you if you choose to read this book for leisure. I feel sorry if you are made to read it! I can't say it enough. this book will make a perfect fire starter for a grill or fireplace. It is also a perfect door stop or you can use it as a mouse pad (hardback version) It provides perfect traction. lol Take it from me if you don't have to read this book DONT!!! Get another book. Even if you have time to waste, don't waste it on this piece of ...!
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