Tuesday May 10, 2005

The Future of Ideas

I just finished Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas. Coming days after the broadcast decision dispels some of the gloom of the final chapters of The Future of Ideas. But one of the fundamental concepts of the book is that the old will resist the new and often the old has more political power then the new. With more neocons (but not conservatives) headed for the courts the books repeated message should be heeded by all who think the freedom to innovate is important to our economy and way of life.

So thats all nice and activist in tenor. But what about the book. I think many of the concepts in the book are excellent. The explanation of the end to end concept and how it applies to the Internet and contrasting it with the phone network is very clear. Pushing forward and building a 3 layer model (physical, code, and content) of the 'net gives a model for talking about how data flows in our current world which is probably comprehensible by the non-techie. I strongly suggest the book to anybody interested in the control of IP in all of its various flavors. Many of the ideas, cases, and ad hoc examples provide fodder for continued battle with the "old" content community and with our lawmakers.

The downside to the book is that it seems repetitive. Many of the cases and examples travel similar ground over and over. I suspect most who have been involved in the software trade during the last decade would feel that way. But thats the price for developing a book that can be given to somebody who doesn't have the same depth of knowledge and wants to understand why napster isn't all the evil they have heard it was or that P2P isn't some sort of new drug that is killing the nations youth. Additionally the legal slant which abstracts away much of the technical haze makes for a clearer look at how various technologies should effect our countries policies. ( May 10 2005, 07:13:12 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]