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The Architecture of Innovation
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Short Description: into its architecture—is an innovation in the ways in which culture gets made. ..... This architecture of innovation that we call the Internet threatens the ...
Content Inside: The Architecture of Innovation Lawrence Lessig1 Every society has resources that are free and resources that are controlled. A free resource is one that anyone equally can take; a controlled resource one can take only with the permission of someone else. E=MC2 is a free resource. You can take it and use it without the permission of the Einstein estate. 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, is a controlled resource. To sleep at 112 Mercer Street requires the permission of the Institute for Advanced Study. A time is marked not so much by the ideas that are argued about, but by the ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs on what one need not question; the power in a particular moment runs with the notions that only the crazy would draw into doubt. Sometimes that’s just fine. I’m happy the question of infanticide is off the table; how extraordinarily tedious it would be if we had regularly to debate whether we wanted to be a democracy. In the language of computer programming: It is a great and valuable thing that certain social ideals get compiled into social life; it is an advantage that everything need not at every moment be interpreted. But sometimes a society gets stuck because of an idea it can’t quite question, or dislodge. Sometimes the idea sticks the society. And when that happens, the hardest part of political action—the hardest part of changing a part of society—is to get people to see how this taken for granted idea might be wrong. To get people to believe that there might be something contestable about what seemed unquestionable; or even to get them to see that the story is more complex than the simple—its morning, same as it ever was, I’m about to be fed—account that is, for most, undeniable. And so it is with us. We live in an era when the idea of property is just such a thought, or better, just such a non- thought; when the importance and value of property is taken for granted; when it is impossible, or at least for us, very hard, to get anyone to entertain a view where property is not central; when to 1 Professor of Law, Stanford Law School. Originally given as the Frey Lecture, Duke Law School.
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