Larry Lessig
617-252-2472
mel_blake@monitor.com
Institutional Corruption
Larry Lessig is interested in non-obvious corruption—instances where a decision is improperly and/or subtly influenced by an actor's anticipation of some sort of indirect economic gain or loss. Institutional corruption can weaken the effectiveness of the institution, as well as weaken the public trust in it.
Many of our institutions have become corrupt not in the sense that there is a blatant payoff for a favor, but rather, where decision-makers routinely are influenced by incentives to favor interests other than those they claim to be advancing—or should be advancing. The incentives are legal, even considered normal; the actions of favoritism are legal, even expected. But the incentives and actions are wrong, nevertheless.
This type of institutional corruption occurs in business, the medical profession, agencies, academia and corporate research, and, of course, in government. Lessig became interested in this form of corruption when advancing the cause of fair copyright law, where he saw that governments consistently ignored the easy case for sane copyright law and got it wrong. Why, he asked? Because of the inappropriate influence of money.
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace
There’s a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated—that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government’s (or anyone else’s) control. In this compelling presentation, Larry argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable because cyberspace has no “nature.” It only has code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom—as the original architecture of the Net did—or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space. Larry believes we can—we must—choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee in order to secure and promote the current environment of innovation. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies as it relates to such issues as privacy, security, and copyright.
