With his 1999 book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," Lessig warned that personal freedoms were at risk as the Internet's architecture changed from an open platform to a more closed, corporate-controlled one. In his new book, published this month by Random House and titled "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World," Lessig sounds the alarm about a corollary problem: the threat to technological innovation. As giant American profit-driven entities increasingly control the structure of the Internet, Lessig warns, that structure will become less and less fertile for the kind of invention that both gave rise to the network and has threatened the entrenched companies dependent on the status quo.
Following studies at the University of Pennsylvania; Trinity College, Cambridge; and Yale Law School, Lessig launched his career clerking for the renowned and controversial conservative jurists Richard Posner, on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and Antonin Scalia, on the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then he has taught at the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School, and was a monthly columnist for The Industry Standard. He serves on the board of the Red Hat Center for Open Source and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he recently co-founded the Center for Internet and Society, a Stanford group litigating Internet privacy, anonymity and hacker-related cases.
Lessig spoke to CNET News.com about recent flare-ups in the battle over the Internet's direction, including the Microsoft, Napster and Sklyarov cases, patent and copyright law, and the increasing power over the Internet exercised by the cable industry.
Q: What's the difference between the threats you identified in your first book and those you've named in the new one?
A: The changes I look at in this book are more fundamental than the ones in the first. These are changes in the core of the network that in effect will compromise the original principles of the network, particularly the principle of end-to-end, which says the network should be as simple as it can be so it can't discriminate among uses and applications. That's being compromised in the use of broadband on the Internet. It's at a lower level of the network, but will have more profound effects.
These are modifications to the original protocols of the network that will facilitate the network owners' desire to discriminate, changing the network from a neutral platform to one that tilts against some uses and applications.
Can you give a specific example?
As cable has taken over the network, the cable companies have begun to architect the implementation of broadband in such a way that they're in a position to control the way the network gets used, to decide what content flows swiftly or slowly.
In the new book you say the Internet revolution faces what you call a "counterrevolution of devastating power and effect." What does that counterrevolution consist of?
The basic dynamic is that the original network presents threats to existing interests, that those are the ones fomenting the counterrevolution. This includes network providers, the people who own the wireless spectrum--they're resisting the original architecture of the network because that architecture facilitates pretty significant competition against them. It's the owners of the pipes, the cable companies, acting in the way I just described, but also, given the power to discriminate that the cable companies have, the telecoms are pushing bills in Congress to be freed of the traditional regulations that require that they remain neutral.
What is Congress doing on this front?
There are a number of bills floating around Congress to do exactly this. It's hard to see where the support lies, but it's pretty strong. (FCC) Chairman (Michael) Powell, in a speech about broadband, advocated that providers be free of common-carrier-like regulations. In my view, that means they are free to engage in the type of discrimination that the original Internet made impossible.
What are some of the less obvious fronts in this war for control?
I'm also concerned about the way that intellectual property is used to protect existing ways of doing business or protect existing business models. In the context of copyright in the music industry, you have a highly concentrated industry in its present form that fears the kind of open competition that the Internet could provide if it were free to deliver and produce content. So through lawsuits the industry has resisted those ways of delivering content and companies designed to facilitate that delivery, and that has left the field empty except for methods they control or approve of. The music industry has effectively vetoed new innovation in the delivery and production of content.
Another threat is in the area of patents, where there has been an explosion of patents in the arena of software and network technologies. They're a kind of tax on the innovation process, in the sense that companies competing in a field governed by patents have to secure defensive patents and engage in significant licensing.
You seem to be identifying two threats, one to the Internet's ability to grow, the other to our personal freedoms. How are the two related?
With regard to the Internet's growth, to the extent that you create burdens in the innovative process, you make it harder to grow commercially by this tax on innovation. In the personal context, one of the great promises in the digital revolution was the promise of greater creativity among individuals to distribute and produce new content, whether music or writing or filmmaking...To the extent that the enforcement of copyright succeeds in closing down access to those resources, it will slow down people's ability to take advantage of this opportunity.
What's the most pressing threat? And how can the average person most effectively respond to it, both to protect him- or herself and to help stem the larger tide of corporate control?
The greatest threat is that before we even recognize the value of creativity and innovation that comes from a neutral platform, the neutral platform will disappear. What people can do to resist this is to resist the increasing efforts through law, like the law of copyright, to exercise control over the future of the Internet.
What people can do is they can become politically involved to insist on a more limited, balanced protection of copyright so it doesn't become a tool by which innovation gets stifled.
