The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 12, 2002 - Computers - 384 pages
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.
 

Contents

Free
3
Building Blocks Commons and Layers
19
Commons on the Wires
26
Commons Among the Wired
49
Commons Wireless
73
Commons Lessons
85
Creativity in Real Space
103
Innovation from the Internet
120
Controlling the Wired and Hence the Content Layer
177
Controlling Wireless and Hence the Physical Layer
218
Whats Happening Here?
234
Alt Commons
240
What Orrin Understands
262
Notes
269
Index
335
Copyright

DOT CONTROL
143

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About the author (2002)

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School. Previously Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School from 1997 to 2000 and professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1991 to 1997, he is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He is a monthly columnist for The Industry Standard, a board member of the Red Hat Center for Open Source, and the author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

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