About the book
Lawrence Lessig takes on the common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated. Cyberspace, he argues, has no fixed nature, only code: the software and hardware that make it what it is, which can build a place of freedom, as the early architecture of the Net did, or one of tight control. Government and commerce each push toward regulation in different ways and for different reasons, and under commercial pressure online behavior is becoming more controlled than behavior offline. Code is written by people no one elected, such as members of the IETF and ICANN. Lessig holds that lawyers, policymakers and citizens must decide which values it carries. He later revised the text through a wiki into Code: Version 2.0.
Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, counts it among the books that shaped his thinking, saying it gave him new ways to think about how markets, technology, social norms and law interact.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Tim O'Reilly (Founder/O'Reilly Media)
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by Larry Lessig. One of my all-time favorite quotes is Edwin Schlossberg's "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." This book gave me a whole new set of tools for thinking about the complex interplay between four forces: government laws and regulations, social norms, technology, and markets. Lessig makes a simple but profound case that you can't think of technical issues in isolation from their legal and cultural context.
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