The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

By Lawrence Lessig

Random House Inc., 2001

320 pages, $30

Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has written a lucid, provocative book on the nature of innovation in complex human organizations. The Future of Ideas is a must-read for every policymaker concerned with the governance of cyberspace, particularly since the Supreme Court is about to review Congress’s 1998 extension to copyright protection. The book is also instructive for executives; although it does not deal with strategy and management issues directly, Professor Lessig’s insights are as applicable within firms as they are to society at large.

Professor Lessig maintains that improvisation lies at the heart of innovation. New inventions rarely, if ever, spring fully formed from the minds of lone inventors. Innovation is a messy process of trial and error, but it is speeded up greatly if innovators have easy access to one another’s work. Until recently, the Internet has been a prime example of how improvisation can flourish in a "commons" — contexts in which resources are essentially free and shared freely.

In cyberspace, this unfettered access to resources is now under threat. As Professor Lessig points out, in the last 40 years, copyright protection has been extended retrospectively eleven times. His fear is that intellectual property rights and government-granted exclusivities are creating a system controlled by the established media oligopolies. Resources are being locked up, stifling innovation and creativity.

The root of the problem, in Professor Lessig’s view, is that the policies used in physical space to control resource use do not work in cyberspace. Physical resources are usually, to use an economic term, rivalrous (e.g., my use of a beach potentially diminishes your use of the beach). To prevent what biologist Garrett Hardin famously termed "the tragedy of the commons" — unsustainable overuse of physical resources — societies employ government regulation, property rights, and pricing mechanisms to limit resource use to sustainable levels. The original promise of the Internet, Professor Lessig contends, was that its modular construction and minimal standards created a commons with free resources that allowed small-scale, decentralized experimentation and fast feedback — ideal conditions for creativity and improvisation using the content, code, and hardware of others. Now this promise is being compromised in friction-free cyberspace by legislation borrowed from the friction-filled real world. In cyberspace, enforcement of property rights is comprehensive and fast: Those threatened by innovation (actual or would-be monopolists) can use the system to defend the status quo. The attempts of many firms to protect their software developments — Amazon’s patent for its "one-click" purchasing program comes to mind immediately — is indicative of this effort. Professor Lessig points out that such resources as ideas, however, are "nonrivalrous" (e.g., my use of the theory of relativity does not diminish yours). Once produced, nonrivalrous resources can be shared without concern about overuse. He argues convincingly that the resources in cyberspace are primarily the nonrivalrous variety.

The author’s thoughtful recommendations are aimed at steering a pragmatic course between the ideological rocks of Big Brother–style regulation and the whirlpools of the unfettered free market. He identifies three layers that make up any communications system — the physical layer (computers, connections, etc.), the code layer (the logic that makes the hardware run), and the content layer (the messages themselves). Each of these layers can be controlled or free, and any control needed should be introduced from the bottom up (and only as required) until policy objectives are reached. Without such an experience-based approach, Professor Lessig fears the balance between our economic needs for efficiency and our democratic desires for creativity will be lost.