Cyberspace's Legal Visionary

Lawrence Lessig on the fate of copyrights and computer networks in the digital future.

Jesse Walker from the June 2002 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Reason: Some of them would argue that they're active in the form of civil disobedience.

Lessig: In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we're in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You're going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I'm not sure it's a viable strategy anymore.

There's some basic cultural differences here. Many of the people who have great ideas in the Slashdot context about the way to run the world -- if you put them in Washington, they just don't fit.

Reason: Aren't you facing the same problem? Some of the proposals in Future are guaranteed to be political non-starters. The chances that Congress is going to adopt five-year renewable copyright terms in this political context are zero.

Lessig: I am not writing because I think it's likely that policy makers will sit down and figure this stuff out right now. I'm more writing about what I think is true, and hoping that eventually a group of people who have the time to think through it will try to do something about it.

Over 15 or 20 years, the movement that Reagan is associated with got the world to think about policy things differently, through many small chips at taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. So eventually it can happen.

Reason: How did a lawyer get interested in technology?

Lessig: My first work in constitutional law was in Eastern Europe. There I learned that constitutional law is about trying to set up structures that embed certain values within a political system. Once I started thinking about constitutional law like that, it was a tiny step to see that that's exactly what the architecture of cyberspace does: It's a set of structures embedding a set of values. To the extent that we like those values, we ought to be defending the architecture of cyberspace. To the extent that we're skeptical about those values, we should be asking whether the architecture is justified or not. Either way, the architecture is analogous to the Constitution.

So it was a simple step. Also, the conferences had better coffee.