Winner of the Ida and Studs Terkel PrizeIn his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the nation and the world.Here for the first time in print is revealed the quintessential Aaron Swartz: besides being a techn...

The reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, Lawrence Lessig spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture — a war waged against those who create and consume art. America's copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists' creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions. Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms every intr...

An analysis of "the Trump era, but not about Trump. . . . but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption" ( New York Times Book Review)."There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are."So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of modern-day American institutions and the corruption that besets them—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate captur...

WITH A NEW FOREWORD ABOUT THE 2020 ELECTION"This urgent book offers not only a clear-eyed explanation of the forces that broke our politics, but a thoughtful and, yes, patriotic vision of how we create a government that's truly by and for the people."—DAVID DALEY, bestselling author of Ratf**ked and UnriggedIn the vein of On Tyranny and How Democracies Die, the bestselling author of Republic, ...

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. Code, first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; 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 ...

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pocket...

Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why ...

Winner of the Ida and Studs Terkel PrizeIn his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the nation and the world.Here for the first time in print is revealed the quintessential Aaron Swartz: besides being a techni...

From two distinguished experts on election law, an alarming look at how the American presidency could be stolen—by entirely legal meansEven in the fast and loose world of the Trump White House, the idea that a couple thousand disorganized protestors storming the U.S. Capitol might actually prevent a presidential succession was farfetched. Yet perfectly legal ways of overturning election results actually do exist, and they would allow a political party to install it...

The fundamental fact about our Constitution is that it is old -- the oldest written constitution in the world. The fundamental challenge for interpreters of the Constitution is how to read that old document over time. In Fidelity & Constraint, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig explains that one of the most basic approaches to interpreting the constitution is the process of translation. Indeed, some of the most significant shifts in constitutional doctrine are products of the evolution...

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig investigates the most vexing problem in American democracy: how money corrupts our nation's politics, and the critical campaign to stop it.In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in *Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-*trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than...

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down a federal prohibition on independent corporate campaign expenditures, is one of the most controversial opinions in recent memory. Defenders of the First Amendment greeted the ruling with enthusiasm, while advocates of electoral reform recoiled in disbelief. Robert C. Post offers a new constitutional theory that seeks to reconcile these sharply divided camps.Post interprets...