It may be viewed as an anonymous free-for-all, but a Stanford law professor says the Internet could turn out to be the nemesis of the free exchange of ideas.
Speaking at the Grafstein Lecture Series on Communication, Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law last month, Lawrence Lessig said code—computer language—not government regulations, are the internet’s most significant laws.
“We are not entering a time when copyright is more threatened than it is in real space,” he said. “We are instead entering a time when copyright is more effectively protected than at any time.”
Addressing a capacity crowd, which included Dean of Telecommunications Lawyers Hudson Janish and Dean of the Faculty of Law Ron Daniels, Lessig illustrated the ability for copyright to be implemented more rigidly in cyberspace than in real space with the example of the Adobe e-book.
The owner of a copyrighted book has the power to photocopy pages or distribute the book, whereas the same book in Adobe e-book format can be designed to give the author added control over the way their book can be used. The author can decide how many pages can be photocopied at one time or if their book can be read aloud on RealAudio. Thus, code can be used to implement stricter forms of copyright.
“We live in a funny time…two great trends are happening, both pushing in opposite directions…. The technological trend is increasing what is possible, while the legal trend is decreasing what is permitted,” said Lessig.
He terms this a conflict between east-coast and west-coast code—in other words, the divide between open-source free-access code and code which galvanizes copyright. A prime example of this tension is Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive.
Kahle, an Internet pioneer and billionaire, has archived television shows and movies already existing in the public domain. Furthermore, he has managed to archive websites by capturing a fully functioning copy of each site and indexing the changes and updates of the site. This technology, called the Brewster Kahle Way Back Machine, allows the public to access and view the evolution of websites from 1996 to present, effectively easing Lessig’s statement that “the scariest part of the Internet is that it has no history.”
But Kahle’s vision of internet library domination can only go so far: his plan to create a searchable archive of books will not be realized due to copyright restrictions.
