The Accidental Activist
Lawrence Lessig infuriates Microsoft, Hollywood, and AOL with ideas that are making an impact across the digital world. March 20, 2001 issue
Brendan I. Koerner
Your first thought is, "Can this be the scourge of Microsoft (MSFT, info)?" Lawrence Lessig lopes into the Stanford Law School cafeteria wearing a shirt-and-sweater ensemble straight out of the J. Crew catalog, circa 1994, and wire-rim eyeglasses that give him an air of debate-club geekiness. Clean-shaven, lanky, and younger-looking than his 39 years, he hardly seems mature enough to be a tenured professor of law, to say nothing of inspiring such intense emotions among Redmond's battle-hardened zillionaires. And what kind of New Economy power player orders a thin-sliced turkey sandwich on whole wheat, for goodness' sake?
There are corporate corridors, however, where the mention of Lessig's name is enough to cause a row. In op-ed articles, legal briefs, and a growing number of public appearances, he has set forth a view of the networked universe that is abhorrent not only to Bill Gates, but to any number of other magnates and executives in the converging worlds of big technology and big media.
Lessig regards himself, proudly, as a scholar and teacher. Yet in the last several years, he has been deeply involved in a series of the Internet's hottest imbroglios. His advice in the Microsoft antitrust suit guided Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson toward his landmark ruling against the software titan. A believer in file-sharing technology, Lessig wrote a brief that helped prevent Napster's summary shutdown. And he has been a virtual one-man crusade against the strengthening of intellectual-property laws, most recently by taking up the cause of a crotchety iconoclast named Eric Eldred, who hopes to overturn a 1998 copyright-extension law bearing the name of its sponsor, the late Rep. Sonny Bono.
Lessig may be a champion of personal freedom, but he is no friend to the Ayn Rand enthusiasts who see all regulation as a threat to the purity of the Internet. "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel," the musician-turned-theorist John Perry Barlow wrote in a manifesto published online in 1996, "I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind....You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." Only by keeping the Internet free from government interference, these pundits hold, can cyberspace reach its full utopian potential.
Hogwash, counters Lessig. He maintains that a far more insidious force has already compromised the Internet's democratic ideals. As the libertarians have stood idly by, he says, corporate behemoths have quietly molded cyberspace to the end of more efficient commerce. The Internet, in other words, is already heavily regulated, albeit by the private sector. It has been shaped not by edicts, but by code-the bits and bytes that form the wired world's digitized backbone. The way Lessig sees it, a handful of companies are transforming cyberspace into a marketer's paradise, to the detriment of all forms of communication that lack obvious revenue-generating potential. Lessig elegantly summarizes this pessimistic paradigm in a catchy three-word slogan: "Code is law."
Laid out in detail in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace , the concept has countless analogies in meatspace. Take Baron Georges Haussmann's overhaul of 19th-century Paris, which replaced crooked medieval streets with broad avenues as a means of frustrating barricade-prone revolutionaries. Or Robert Moses' construction of low-slung highway bridges along the roads to Long Island's beaches, the better to enforce racial segregation. His design choice ensured that only car drivers (primarily whites at the time) could pass, while beachgoers traveling by bus (primarily African Americans) were shunted elsewhere.
Online behavior, too, is regulated by architecture, Lessig argues. The control is subtle but omnipresent.
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