They are much less appealing.įortunately, we now have Lawrence Lessig, professor of constitutional law at Harvard and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The arguments that counter these declarations of freedom tend to be stodgy and pedantic statements about government and responsibility. I guess we could think of them as the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' of the Internet generation. Some of them seem just silly, some of them have a ring of truth, but they all have a catchy appeal about them in the way that they declare a kind of unbounded enthusiasm for the new world order. We have all encountered passages such as those above, declarations by the digerati of cyberspace on its nongovernability. You have no sovereignty where we gather.-John Perry Barlow(2) On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.-Nicholas Negroponte(1) Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.By Lawrence Lessig. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. We can-we must-choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where our behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space.But that’s not inevitable either. That code can create a place of freedom-as the original architecture of the Net did-or a place of exquisitely oppressive control.If we miss this point, then we will miss how cyberspace is changing. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable cyberspace has no “nature.” It only has code-the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is.

Abstract: There’s a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government’s (or anyone else’s) control.Code argues that this belief is wrong.

Code and other laws of cyberspace