the United States. The exchange rate for There-bucks was 1787 to 1 — 1787 being the year the United States Constitution was written. And as the then-CEO of There explained to a class I was teaching, the values of the American republic informed the values of There.
My students were skeptical. And one fantastically bright student, Catherine Crump, gave the CEO a bit of a rough ride. She asked whether There would respect the principles of the First Amendment. “Of course”, responded the CEO. “Would a citizen of There be allowed to put a sign on his land?” “Of course.” “Would she be allowed to buy land next to, say, Nike?” “Of course.” “Would she be allowed to put a sign up on her land next to Nike that says ‘Nike uses sweatshop labor’?” “Umm. I’m not sure about that.” So much for the First Amendment.
Or more relevantly to Second Life, Crump asked, “Who owns the IP intellectual property in the designs a citizen creates?” “There does.” “Who owns the IP in the designs Nike creates?” “Of course, Nike does. How could it be any other way?” Well, it could be another way if you followed the principles of the American Constitution, Crump suggested, which said IP rights get vested in “authors or inventors”, not in corporations.
There’s real problem, however, was structural. It is the same problem of any planned or centralized economy. There was to be built by There, Inc. And therein was its problem. The structures of these virtual worlds are extraordinarily complex. The cost of building them is immense, and thus There, Inc. faced a huge capital cost in making There run.
Second Life (like all new nations) outsourced that cost of construction to its citizens. When you buy land in Second Life, you get an empty field or deserted island. You then have to buy, barter, or build to make it habitable. There’s an economy to building it, and it can be hard work. But the things you build you can sell. And again, the designs you make are yours. More than 100,000 people now inhabit, and construct, Second Life. For them, the game is what it says.
These current rules, however, are the product of an evolution in Second Life. In the first public Alpha testing of the site that would become Second Life, there was no concept of land ownership. Everything was public. The ownership of land began with Beta testing, when all users could claim the public land at a price. When the land was claimed, the user could select whether others could create objects, scripts, or landmarks for the land. Later the options were extended.
In version 1.1, there was a fairly major change to the physics of land. Whereas before users were free to teleport anywhere, now, to avoid harassment, owners of land could decide whether others could “trespass” or not — either by setting a default to grant or deny access, or by adding a list of people who were free to visit. These restrictions, however, applied only to the first 15 meters above the property. Beyond that, anyone was free to fly, even if the owner didn’t want them on the property.
Now this last restriction has an interesting parallel to the history of American law. As I describe in Free Culture,[50] property law in the American tradition considered the owner of land the owner of the space from the ground “an indefinite extent, upwards.”[51] This created an obvious conflict when airplanes appeared. Did the pilot of an airplane trespass when he flew over your land?
The accommodation the law eventually drew was between flying very low and flying very high. It was not trespassing to fly very high over someone’s land; it was a nuisance to fly very low over someone’s land. So something like the solution that Second Life achieved was also achieved by the law.
But notice the important difference. In real space, the law means you can be penalized for violating the “high/low” rule. In Second Life, you simply can’t violate the 15-meter rule. The rule is part of the code. The code controls how you are in Second Life. There isn’t a choice about obeying the rule or not, any more than there’s a choice about obeying gravity.
So code is law here. That code/law enforces its control directly. But obviously, this code (like law) changes. The key is to recognize that this change in the code is (unlike the laws of nature) crafted to reflect choices and values of the coders.
Consider another illustration of the same point. As I said, Second Life gives the creators of Intellectual Property in Second Life ownership of that property — both inside and outside Second Life.[52] (As one of the founders described, “Our lawyers shook their heads, but we decided the future of our company isn’t tied up in our owning what our users create.”[53]) That’s the same with IP in real space: Unless you’ve signed your rights away to a corporation (don’t!), when you create in real space, the law automatically gives you a copyright in your creativity. In both spaces, too, you have the right to give those rights away. I run a nonprofit called Creative Commons that makes it simple for creators to signal the freedoms they want to run with their creativity. In real space, when you use a Creative Commons license, you mark your content with the license you want. Users then know the freedoms they have. If a right is violated, it gets remedied through the law.
Second Life has taken this idea one step further. Creators in Second Life can mark their content with the license they want. But the wizards of this world are exploring the idea that the license they’ve selected could affect directly what others can do with that creativity. If content is marked with a Creative Commons license, then someone can take a picture of it without express permission. But if it is not marked with a license, then if you try to take a picture of it, the object will be invisible. Here again, the code expresses the law more effectively than the law in real space ever could.
The Internet
As I said, we can distinguish cyberspace from the Internet. But the point of this chapter, however clear with respect to cyberspace, is still true of the Internet. There are architectural features of the Internet that embed certain values. Those features can also change, and if they do, the values the Internet promotes will be different.
The most significant example of this is one I only mentioned in the first edition of this book, but which was at the center of The Future of Ideas. This is the “end-to-end” principle described by network architects Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1981.[54] The end-to-end (“e2e”) principle is a design philosophy about how networks should be built. It counsels that a network should be kept as simple as possible and that the intelligence required in a network be vested in the edge, or ends of a network, at least so far as that’s possible.
As I’ve already described, the Internet embodied this principle by keeping the functionality of TCP/IP focused quite narrowly — that is, on the single function best-efforts delivery of packets of data. What those packets do, or who they’re meant for, is not a concern of the protocol. Just delivering packets is the end.
One consequence of this design, then, is that people can innovate for this network without any need to coordinate with any network owner. If you want to develop an application to deliver voice across IP, then all you need to do is to write the application to use the TCP/IP protocols to send data across the network in a way that will
