The following is more or less verbatim,  out of the book review column
("The Reference Library") in the current issue of Analog
magazine.

The book is "The Future of Ideas:  The fate of the Commons in a
Connected World." by Lawrence Lessig, Vintage, $15, 352+xxiv pp. ISBM
0-375-72644-6.

(Review follows)

In "The Futur of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World",  Lessig discusses the vast importance to freedom,  economics, 
and innovation of resources owned and used in common,  and the damage that
can be done when resources are locked up in private vaults.  He does not
argue against private ownership,  but for balance,  showing for instance
that when AT&T had an armlock on telecommunications,  it stifled
innovation despite Bell Labs' sparkling reputation.  (Anyone remember the
Hush-a-Phone?).  After the Bell Break-Up,  telecom innovatoin flourished as
never before.

One major threat today lies in the legal protections given the corportate
owners of intellectual property,  to the point where film-makers,  for
instance,  must gain permission and/or pay fees to include any recognizable
product in their works.  Film thus becomes an enterprise for the wealthy, 
not the art student,  and innovation vanishes.  Software and web
technologies are hamstrung in similar ways,  and this is of course his
focus,  for Lessig is a scholar of the cyber-realm.

We are ruled,  he tells us,  by judges and lobbyists,  and the Internet's
architecture of innovation is being abandoned,  without most people even
noticing,  in favor of an architecture of control.  What's more,  he wrote
in his preface,  he was afraid that his book would seem quaintly and rosily
optimistic by the time it hit the bookstores.  Since he finished the book
before September 11,  2001,  and the ensuing rush to surveillance,  he was
surely right.  Yet,  he says,  though we mae be "failing that ideal
[of balance] just now...we need not fail if principle -- not politics --
defines the fight.

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