Lawrence Lessig Livres

The writings of the computer genius and Internet hacktivist whose tragic suicide shook the world.

Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated—that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no “nature.” It only has code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom—as the original architecture of the Net did—or a place of exquisitely oppressive control.If we miss this point, then we will miss how cyberspace is changing. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where our behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space.But that's not inevitable either. We can—we must—choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas , Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pockets of media magnates, has rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress.Lessig weaves the history of technology and its relevant laws to make a lucid and accessible case to protect the sanctity of intellectual freedom. He shows how the door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology is creating extraordinary possibilities that have implications for all of us. Vital, eloquent, judicious and forthright, The Future of Ideas is a call to arms that we can ill afford to ignore.

"Code counters the common belief that cyberspace cannot be controlled or censored. To the contrary, under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable world where behavior will be much more tightly controlled than in real space." -- Cover.

Zittrain's extraordinary book pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today--and explains that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success.

Argues that future generations are being harmed by a restrictive copyright system that protects corporate interests, in a report that calls for an end of the practice of criminalizing artists who build on the creative works of others and for implementing a collaborative and profitable "hybrid economy" that protects both creative and ethical needs. 30,000 first printing.

With insight and urgency, Harvard law professor and author of the bestselling Republic, Lost Lessig argues that the government does not represent society and shows that reform is both essential and possible. America's democracy is in crisis.

Lessig mounts an unflinching case that money and power have corrupted nearly every institution in American life-and that unless we accept the part we each, in our well-meaning way, have played in getting us here, we won't be able to make things better.