In 1999, the world braced for Y2K, The Matrix hit theaters, and the unfettered optimism that characterized the early years of the World Wide Web gave way to concerns over privacy, security and reliability. In this milieu, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books), in which he dismissed the then-prevailing notion that the Internet was a bastion of freedom that could not be controlled.
In Code, Lessig argued that two kinds of “code” dictate where we can go on the web, what we see there, and what rights and protections we have: software, or West Coast code, and the law, or East Coast code. “The moral of this argument is that policy makers must understand and consider both when thinking about how best to preserve the values we want cyberspace to have,” he says. The book was a wake-up call. It sold more than 40,000 copies and became one of the most widely read treatises on cyberlaw.
But a lot has changed in six years: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been enacted; the original Napster has come and gone; Amazon and eBay have celebrated 10-year anniversaries. And Code is due for an update. So, for the second edition, Lessig is embarking on an experiment in collaborative online editing. He’s posted the entire text on the web and invited Internet users to pick through it, find sections that need updating and suggest revisions. Then, he’ll collect and vet all the edits, and the resulting manuscript will be published as Code v.2.
“Code has become a part of the culture of cyberlaw,” said Lessig, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, in announcing the project. “When it became time to update it, I thought who better than that culture.”
It’s a gamble to be sure, but Lessig is known for walking the high-tech walk. In 2001, he co-founded Creative Commons, which allows creators to design their own copyright protections (“some rights reserved,” a Creative Commons license reads). In 2004, he convinced Penguin Books to make his third book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down and Control Creativity, available online, gratis, arguing that it would drive hard-copy sales. Now, he’s invited anyone and everyone to pick through his scholarship and edit it, with the notion of harnessing their collective wisdom. (He’s donating the book advance and royalties to Creative Commons.) “I have confidence that by making Code its own, the community will make Code better,” Lessig said at the outset of the project.
The approach might send a shudder through many academics, but Lessig is undaunted. “Ideas are always free of the constraints of intellectual property, and there is nothing any of us can do to control them—as I’ve painfully discovered in reading reviews of my books and the exams of my students,” he says. “So, having come to terms with having no control over the important stuff, it was not difficult to give up control over the less important stuff.”
The technology that makes large-scale collaboration like this possible is known as “wiki” (Hawaiian for “quick”). Most pages on the Internet can only be read, but a wiki is a collection of web pages that anyone can edit. Perhaps the best example is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with more than 700,000 articles (on topics ranging from the A-Team to Z bosons) written entirely by volunteers. The idea behind Wikipedia—and to some extent, wikis in general—is that the consensus of a large group is more powerful than the views of a few experts.
The Code v.2 wiki resides at a site called JotSpot, founded in 2004 by Joe Kraus, ’93, and Graham Spencer, ’93, MS ’94. Their goal was to make it simple for novices to dive in and start editing. Unlike some other wiki sites, at JotSpot you don’t have to know HTML, the language of the World Wide Web. You just type as you would in a word-processing program and your changes appear instantly on the web page. “A lot of the wikis people build in JotSpot are intended for private collaboration between a group of five or 10 or 20 people,” Spencer explains. “But people also build wikis—Code is a great example—that are very consistent with the principles of Creative Commons and the kinds of things that Lessig is doing.”
Kraus and Spencer met in their freshman dorm, then called Madera, in Wilbur Hall. After graduation they founded the Excite search engine, along with four other dorm mates. Then in 2001 they formed DigitalConsumer.org, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers’ rights to fair use of digital media. “Which is how we got connected with Larry [Lessig],” Kraus says. “Graham and I share a strong conviction with Larry on the need, the urgency, for reform in this area.”
For his part, Lessig says he has “great admiration” for Kraus and Spencer: “JotSpot is the perfect platform for this experiment,” he says. “I wanted to see how it would shine.”
Collaborative editing is not without precedent. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times opened its editorial page to Internet readers. The “wikitorial” experiment failed when vandals forced them to shut down the site after just two days. Vandals also regularly target Wikipedia, but vigilant Wikipedians find and restore damaged pages—usually in less than five minutes—which deters all but the most determined troublemakers. In the end it comes down to who cares more. And the Code project has a lot of dedicated people supporting it: 16 chapter captains, nine deputies and more than 400 registered editors—about evenly split between academics, lawyers and computer geeks.
“Part of what makes this exciting is the motley group of contributors,” says project director Jake Wachman, a senior majoring in science, technology and society. “An expert in intellectual property law could be editing alongside a high school student with a passion for copyright cases. And that student could be more on-point and make better edits. At least that’s the hope.”
Creative Commons general counsel Mia Garlick signed on to the project after reading about it on Lessig’s blog. She e-mailed him seeking to be the captain for chapter 10, which concerns intellectual property. Overall, says Garlick, LLM ’93, the developments of the past six years have borne out the arguments in Code. But her job as chapter captain is to point out holes and get the discussion going. The idea is that people engage in debates and come to some agreement about what changes need to be made.
In practice, though, there have been a few snags. “I have been surprised at the lack of people who were willing to step up and make edits,” Garlick says. “I had hoped that people would swap ideas and stories about products and new technologies that limit usage of copyrighted works.”
This isn’t entirely surprising, says Larry Sanger, a co-creator of Wikipedia who left the project in 2002. If the Code experiment succeeds, Sanger says, it will be primarily because “Larry Lessig is very famous in his field, and lots of smart people want to work with him.” If it doesn’t, “it will be because he could not muster enough interest in actually mucking around with his words to the necessary extent. What makes Wikipedia work so incredibly is that everyone, immediately upon contributing, feels he has a personal stake in the production. Matters are different if Larry Lessig’s name is on the product and they will merely receive acknowledgements.”
Indeed, some contributors seem inclined to take matters into their own hands. One wanted to redefine the term intellectual property. “I think they want to write a new Code rather than update the old one!” Garlick says. And on the whole, progress has been slower than anticipated. The process was originally expected to take about six months, with major edits complete by midsummer. Now it is likely to continue until at least the end of the year.
But, says Lessig, “The key to a wiki is the community, and communities grow, they aren’t produced.” And the ultimate payoff could be a big one. After Code v.2 is published in early 2006, the wiki will continue as a living document. So if the book needs another revision six years from now? “Maybe by then, the wiki will make it self-updating.”
GRETA LORGE, ’97, is an assistant editor at Wired magazine.
