Lawrence Lessig on Cyberlaw

All of the information comes from an interview on DemocracyNow! with Lawrence Lessig and opinions by me. You find the interview at http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/17/law_professor_lawrence_lessig_on_net

-Net Neutrality
-Google
-‘Creative Commons’
-‘Change Congress’


A Public hearing on Net Neutrality in Stanford on Thursday, April 17, 2008, was held to discuss the rules that should govern the Internet. This is part of an ongoing investigation into Comcast who blocked the uploading of peer-to-peer video traffic on BitTorrent. The first hearing was in February at Harvard where Comcast paid people to fill seats and genuine participants had to wait outside. Lawrence Lessig, a leader in cyberlaw, founder and co-director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and Chair of Creative Commons Project, and most recent project, Change Congress, discuss the urgent issues with the Internet. In class we watched a Ted talk with him on “How creativity is being strangled by the law”.

As the monopoly of power over the Internet increases between a few major telecommunication conglomerates we are beginning to loose what made the Internet so exceptional, the power it gives to the people. The major companies like Comcast are trying ‘pick and choose’ what will run on their networks and what kind of information will be available. The issue of network neutrality is being discussed to make sure the government doesn’t allow them to have this kind of control.

Comcast is being investigated for blocking peer-to-peer sharing on BitTorrent. They continued to deny that they were blocking traffic until it was proven, and only then did they say, “Well, we’re not blocking the traffic; we’re just slowing the traffic.” They were accomplishing this by ‘inserting little messages’ to confuse the users.

Lessig tries to explain the concept of net neutrality with a helpful analogy: When you plug appliances into a wall it doesn’t distinguish who is plugging it in, what it is, or who made it. This is a neutral network. Now the telecommunications industries are trying to regulate the network. It’s not about just putting on whatever information you want or being able to access any information you want, you would have to pay to have content on the internet and the network will decide whether they want that content to be available. Making it a non-neutral network.

If the information had to be approved before it got to be published, Lessig says that sites like Google would of never been possible. Google has created a system that has figured out a way to add value to what’s out there on the web. If they had need approval before adding it to the Internet, it would’ve take years for the companies to figure out the technology and approve it. Lessig describes this predicament as:

“What the internet did, for most of its history, was say to innovators, ‘If you build the next great mousetrap, it will run on our network.’ And what’s happening now is the network owners are basically saying, ‘No, we want the right to say whether something can run on our network or not. Now, trust us. We’ll pick the best applications, and we’ll make sure that it’s the right mix of speech.’ And that’s why it’s become critical that the FCC set a very clear principle here, that they want a network, an internet network, that’s consistent with the way it’s been from the very beginning: open and neutral and free.”

Creative Commons deals with another aspect that involves ownership and the Internet. Five years ago Creative Commons was created as a response to what his group sees as “radically overburden some regulation around copyright”. Basically people want to have there work out there for other people such as artist to reuse, remix and be creative with (excluding commercial purposes), but copy right law says you must get permission to use it. Now people can mark their creative work with Creative Commons license and the “freedoms they want it to carry”. Now there are over one hundred million objects marked with Creative Commons license.

Lessig’s Change Congress project was developed with the idea that real reform happens in Congress and we have to make Congress committed to reform. Lessig sees the public as having a fundamental lack of faith in what the government does and that the system is about money. So what a Change Congress license does is it says:

“I’m not going to take money from lobbyists or PACs, I believe in public financing for public elections, I want to abolish earmarks, and I believe in increased transparency in Congress.”
At the end of the interview Amy Goodman asked Lessing, “What do you see is the role of media in reforming government?”

His basic response was that they needed to “get deeper”. He brought up the point that in the beginning of interview she said, “No sound bites”, Lessig views the media’s as focusing to represent information in as little time as possible to keep peoples attention, as a result, nothing substantial is ever explored. Sound bites are such short pieces of speech that can also easily be taken out of their context and as easily manipulated. Also when I looked up sound bite on Wikipedia I found it interesting that Marshall McLuhan helped to recognize the phenomenon.

I believe that the idea of no sound bites is essential to the transparency in media, government, news, and everything else. What makes DemocracyNow! such a great source for news and information is how successful they are in making information available. They don’t sum up reports for you, they bring in people from the source, who know first hand what they’re talking about and they sit for a good 20 min to discuss the stories in depth. DemocracyNow! also makes their broadcasts and transcripts available for any one to use, implementing the Creative Commons project. This interview with Lawrence Lessig would have never happened on any other major news station and intern the in-depth explanation would have never been heard.