Book Title:
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in the Connected World Author: Lawrence Lessig
Publisher: New York : Random House, c2001.
Edition: 1st ed.
Description: xiii, 352 p. ; 25 cm.
ISBN: 0375505784 (hc : acid-free paper)
Call Number: K1401.L47 2001

The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig is remarkably readable for those, like me, whose values are challenged by the complete idea of openness of the Internet. There is now little doubt that the explosion of creativity centering around the Internet has been phenomenal. But according to Lessig, we are already on the way destroying the condition of freedom and creativity on the Internet. This is because the Internet has developed from its early stage of simply forwarding all packets without further ado till a more market-and-state-regulated "product", like closed-circuit television.

Lessig supports that we need to preserve the Internet as an open, creative environment. This openness is socially beneficial and fully consistent with our legal and political traditions. In the first part of the book, where Leggis summarizes the Internet's history, he analyzes the conditions for openness online and the creativity they encourage. He then presents the legal issues surrounding it and destroying its characteristics. Finally he proposes what we could do to set up regulations to preserve the openness of the Internet.

The creativity arises because the Internet is "commons", which, like common land or the highway system, means that everyone has the same access rights. Lessig suggests that such an openness of the Internet is a consequence of the "end-to-end" (e2e) principle, according to which the network itself is kept as simple and "stupid" as possible. So the Internet, in its original concept, is simple in the sense that it handles all packets equally, regardless of content or ownership.

This is changing rapidly as the Internet technology improves. As the Internet access shifts to broadband, cable companies are becoming the dominant ISPs. Big companies could control packet disposal, decide the access speed on certain sites, and restrict users experience on the network. We are moving from "nobody-knows-you-are-a-dog-on-the-Internet" age to a time you could easily expose your identity and even other more personal information by simply surfing on the Internet. The power, that is the ability to control the uses of the network, moves from the users to the owners, and from the many to the few.

Lessig argues against this centralization of control because it stifles innovation which is beneficial to the common interest. This is quite a dilemma here. Large companies would rather concentrate on the center market, where large clients operate, than invest radically new ones. But new markets tend to arise at the margins. Lessig points out that almost all of the groundbreaking applications of the Internet, including the e-mail, the web, the instant messaging, p2p transferring, were created by marginal inventors. So what we need to improve here is to create a better environment to preserve the openness of the Internet, which is crucial to the growth and expansion of new technologies. Lessig concludes it as a balance between the rights of the owners to generate profts from these resources and the rights of the public to use these resources.

At the last part of the book, Lessig provides suggestions for reform to the present law that would help maintain the balance. One of the examples that I like is that copyrights on software expire automatically after five years. It can be renewed if the author wishes, but will become public if the author does not request. This sounds reasonable when we consider how quickly software can advance in five years.

For me, the book somewhat unsurprisingly has an American bias, based on an American university and thus tends to overestimate the ability of law in the US to determine social reality in global terms. The Internet development outside the US, under some other political, social and cultural circumstances could bring up new perspectives over this topic.