Subject areaProcess and organisation
Lawrence Lessig is an American legal scholar and Harvard law professor, a key figure of the internet for founding Creative Commons and for sitting on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the association that defends civil liberties online).
He belongs to the line of thought that set out to define an ethical and legal framework for the emerging information society.
Two ideas make him recognisable:
- «Code is law», from the 1999 book «Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace»: online, people's behaviour is regulated by software architecture as much as by laws, so whoever writes the code also writes the rules;
- «Free Culture», from the 2004 book: copyright that is too rigid holds back creativity, which feeds on reuse. It is the same idea Lessig had already put into practice in 2001 by founding Creative Commons, with its «some rights reserved» licences: the book gives it its theory three years later.
In March 2010 Lessig gave the keynote lecture of the «Internet è Libertà» (Internet is Freedom) conference at the Italian Chamber of Deputies, recounted in an article on the site's Italian blog: you cannot understand what the internet is by thinking about single applications.
An example
A bank decides its app accepts transfers only after a double identity check: no internal rule imposes it, yet the code makes it impossible to bypass. This is Lessig's «code is law», the rule written into the program.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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