Ah I have a thought about this. I have noticed for some time that Lessig walks a strange line on the issue of IP (intellectual property) and freedom & privacy.

Lessig believes IP is necessary & requires architectural changes to the internet to protect it. He is in favor of government monitoring to protect IP as long as it is done in accordance with the law, and he proposes a flawed mechanism (P3P) to protect your privacy.

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Disclaimer: I haven't had the time to scrutinize this guy. I'm merely writing down the ideas that have been crystalizing in my head the past year or so while encountering his books, talks, and such. I'm all ears to criticism.

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First, consider his stance on IP. There is no denying, as evidence in reading over his book "Free Culture" ($16.00), that while he sees existing IP laws as having gone too far, IP must exist in order to protect the monetary incentive of the creator. While many people blindly agree with this justification for IP laws, it's worth mentioning that many disagree, and also that he fails to weigh the evidence of whether IP laws actually promote progress in art and science. For Lessig, it is an assumption.

Second, consider his book "Code".

Page 140 under "Choices" he writes, "I've argued that cyberspace will open up at least two important choices in the context of intellectual property: whether to allow intellectual property in effect to become completely propertized..., and whether to allow this regime to erase the anonymity latent in less efficient architectures of control. These choices were not made by our framers. They are for us to make now". Here, I am paraphrasing, he is saying we have to choose between having complete trusted computing in handling our internet activities in order to prevent piracy, or we have to monitor internet activity and lessen our anonymity. His solution, on the same page, is to ensure pseudonymity, which is exactly what the NSA claims. Yet any hacker worth a dime knows the flaw in claiming that the NSA's methods ensure pseudonymity.

Next, page 158 he writes, "It might be said that the principle ... is to ban all of these inoffensive and invisible searches. Perhaps that should be done. But ... imagine substitutions that protect the same value without sacrificing the benefit these technologies might bring." Here he is defending blanket monitoring, as long as it is modified in some way. His idea of this modification is on page 160: "What is needed is a way for the machine to negotiate our privacy concerns for us, a way to delegate the negotiating process to a smart agent." and the mechanism that he proposes is "P3P, ... an architecture within which users can express their preferences and negotiate the use of data about them".

Sure he admits that P3P has unresolvable problems. But his next sentence doesn't sit well either. "... Imagine an architecture, tied to a market, that protects privacy rights" ...

The problem with all of his suggestions is that they simply don't work. Either Lessig is ignorant about the nature of information, or he is deliberately suggesting red herrings to problems of the kind of NSA surveillance. You can't fix that with a P3P or a market. You can't even fix it well with encryption unless you're using Perfect Forward Secrecy. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but still... if you connect the dots, you may find that at worst Lessig is an apologist for the surveillance state, and at best offers no real solutions to the problem of internet privacy.

It's also worth noting that while Lessig associates with Aaron in many ways, their roots could not be any more different. Aaron started within the law, helping creating things like RSS and Creative Commons, but over time he became more of an activist, and condoned more aggressive tactics of information freedom, as evidenced in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2008)... "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access." On the other hand, Lessig staunchly supports the IP system, and fails to propose a system that Aaron would agree with.

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- EOM