Code: Version 2.0: Difference between revisions

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{{review|Code: Version 2.0|Lawrence Lessig|R1ABHI9NFQ8WFV|9 February 2008|Modern philosophy}}
{{review|Code: Version 2.0|Lawrence Lessig|R1ABHI9NFQ8WFV|9 February 2008|Modern philosophy}}
If you take Web 2.0 at all seriously then, whatever your political or philosophical persuasion, {{author|Lawrence Lessig}}'s {{Bookreview|Code: Version 2.0}} is a compulsory read.  
If you take Web 2.0 at all seriously then, whatever your political or philosophical persuasion, {{author|Lawrence Lessig}}’s {{Bookreview|Code: Version 2.0}} is a compulsory read.  


Code: Version 2.0 presents a novel and striking re-evaluation of some fundamental social, legal and ethical conceptions. It is persuasive that our traditional, deeply-held, and politically-entrenched ways of looking at the world are not fit for purpose any more.
Code: Version 2.0 presents a novel and striking re-evaluation of some fundamental social, legal and ethical conceptions. It is persuasive that our traditional, deeply-held, and politically-entrenched ways of looking at the world are not fit for purpose any more.
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{{Author|Lawrence Lessig}} charts the technical and epistemological grounds for thinking that the internet revolution (and specifically the "Web 2.0" revolution) is as significant as any societal shift in human history. Generally, this is not news for people in the IT industry, who deal with its implications day to day, but for our legal brethren, who tend of be of a conservative (if not technophobic) stripe, this ought to be as revelatory (and revolutionary) as Wat Tyler’s march on London. Now we have a hyperlinked, editable digital commons, the assumptions with which we have constructed our society need to be rethunk.
{{Author|Lawrence Lessig}} charts the technical and epistemological grounds for thinking that the internet revolution (and specifically the "Web 2.0" revolution) is as significant as any societal shift in human history. Generally, this is not news for people in the IT industry, who deal with its implications day to day, but for our legal brethren, who tend of be of a conservative (if not technophobic) stripe, this ought to be as revelatory (and revolutionary) as Wat Tyler’s march on London. Now we have a hyperlinked, editable digital commons, the assumptions with which we have constructed our society need to be rethunk.


For example, copyright: a law framed in the pre-digital era where there was no ready means to replicate "content" which didn't itself involve considerable labour and expense, it made sense to protect intellectual property in this way. But faced with the new commercial imperatives of the digital age, Lessig argues compellingly that the existing legal framework simply cannot apply, that any attempt to fit it to the new social reality which, QED, must have been beyond the contemplation of the framers of the law is a creative (and therefore potentially illegitimate) legal/political act. Down this path, Lessig's arguments have more interest for consitutional lawyers and may lead the lay reader a little cold.
For example, copyright: a law framed in the pre-digital era where there was no ready means to replicate “content” which didn’t itself involve considerable labour and expense, it made sense to protect intellectual property in this way. But faced with the new commercial imperatives of the digital age, Lessig argues compellingly that the existing legal framework simply cannot apply, that any attempt to fit it to the new social reality which, QED, must have been beyond the contemplation of the framers of the law is a creative (and therefore potentially illegitimate) legal/political act. Down this path, Lessig's arguments have more interest for consitutional lawyers and may lead the lay reader a little cold.


Lessig provides us with an alternative framework for discussing legal issues like copyright, intellectual property protection and privacy, and is convincing that our old tools for conversing on these issues - which predate the digital revolution in its entirely, let alone the internet revolution or Web 2.0 - just won't give us useful answers to our conundrums. Lessig also re-opens the book on what even counts as law - what we mean by "regulability" - in an environment online where the power exists, by computer code, to create "laws" of a more natural kind - that are laws not because they *should* or *may* not be broken, but because they *cannot* be broken.
Lessig provides us with an alternative framework for discussing legal issues like copyright, intellectual property protection and privacy, and is convincing that our old tools for conversing on these issues - which predate the digital revolution in its entirely, let alone the internet revolution or Web 2.0 - just won't give us useful answers to our conundrums. Lessig also re-opens the book on what even counts as law - what we mean by "regulability" - in an environment online where the power exists, by computer code, to create "laws" of a more natural kind - that are laws not because they *should* or *may* not be broken, but because they *cannot* be broken.