In 1813, as part of a correspondence with Isaac McPherson, Thomas Jefferson penned a mini-disquisition on the peculiar issues confronting patent law: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation."

Information, to borrow a more recent slogan, wants to be free. According to Lawrence Lessig's dazzling new book, The Future of Ideas, that freedom is under assault, despite recent technological developments that would seem to embody the Jeffersonian vision. "The digital world is closer to the world of ideas than to the world of things," Lessig writes. "We in cyberspace, that is, have built a world that is close to the world of ideas that nature (in Jefferson's words) created: stuff in space can 'freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition."

And yet the freedom of cyberspace and its capacity for mutual instruction is under fire. The very ethos of the web--a kind of organized anarchy, free of both government and private-sector control--has been gravely injured by recent events: changes in copyright law, changes to the underlying architecture of the net, changes in the competitive landscape of the digital economy. "The essence of the changes in the environment of the Internet that we are observing now are changes that alter the balance between control and freedom on the Net. The tilt of these changes is pronounced: control is increasing."

The word "control" itself is used advisedly. Lessig, now a professor at Stanford Law School, begins The Future of Ideas with a shout-out to his former colleague Andrew Shapiro, whose book The Control Revolution discussed the battle between control and freedom without necessarily predicting which side would win (or even which deserved to win). "Shapiro did not predict which future would be ours," Lessig explains. "Indeed, his argument was that bits of each future were possible, and that we must choose a balance between them. His account was subtle, but optimistic. If there was a bias to the struggle, he, like most of us then, believed the bias would favor freedom. This book picks up where Shapiro left off. Its message is neither subtle nor optimistic.... we are far enough along to see the future we have chosen. In that future, the counter-revolution prevails. The forces that the original Internet threatened to transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet."

Translated into another revolutionary's language, Lessig's is a story of all that is air melting into solid. But is our digital future--not to mention the present--really as grim as Lessig claims? Whether you accept the premise of Lessig's argument, The Future of Ideas confirms what his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally promised: Lessig is one of the brightest minds grappling with the consequences of the digital world today, as deft and original with technical intricacies as he is with broad legal theory. He manages to breathe new life into seemingly exhausted economic ideas--his take on the tragedy of the commons is likely to entrance even the most jaded game theorist--and tell some fascinating stories along the way, on the freewheeling early days of the radio spectrum, or the distributed computing project that harnesses spare processing cycles from thousands of computers around the world to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The Future of Ideas is also a deeply iconoclastic work, at least when measured against the standard assumptions of American politics. Lessig is sometimes cast as a trustbusting progressive after his brief involvement as "special master" in the Microsoft antitrust case (appointed by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to advise the court, he was subsequently removed after Microsoft protested that he was biased against the software giant). Lessig's positions can seem contradictory: The book is fundamentally a celebration of decentralized innovation, and yet it is deeply distrustful of too much power concentrating in the hands of the private sector. Lessig is no middle-of-the-road New Democrat: He's a radical critic who doesn't fit readily into any existing ideological camp. In a sense, you can see his politics as distinctly net-native, closest in spirit to those of open-source software, the semi-anarchic collective movement that engineered the now-legendary Linux operating system.

Open-source software projects tilt heavily in the direction of freedom: No one owns the underlying code behind Linux, and thousands have contributed to it. The software grows more sophisticated over time for three central reasons: (1) The ethos of the hacker community has a strong communitarian tradition that encourages contributions, which are rewarded only by the respect of one's peers, (2) modern software applications are modular enough to be built by committee, with thousands of dispersed participants chipping in their ideas, and (3) because the code base is openly shared with anyone interested in looking at it--unlike Microsoft's hidden Windows source code--interesting new ideas "freely spread from one to another over the globe," if not for the moral and mutual instruction of man, then at least for the improvement of his printer drivers.

This is the story of the triumph of the commons--free of both government and corporate control. Its principles animate nearly every page of Lessig's book: a mix of the libertarian's contempt for centralized control and the socialist's belief in the power of communal property. This would sound schizophrenic and impractical if it weren't for the empirical success of open-source projects like Linux, or the widely used web server Apache--or indeed the web itself, which was founded on nonproprietary standards. What are the politics of these new systems? It is not, according to Lessig, "the traditional struggle between Left and Right or between conservative and liberal. To question assumptions about the scope of 'property' is not to question property. I am fanatically pro-market, in the market's proper sphere.... The arguments I draw upon...are as strongly tied to the Right as to the Left.... Instead, the real struggle at stake now is between old and new."

The trouble, as Lessig sees it, is that the new is being challenged by the old. We are in the midst of a kind of digital-age Restoration, in which the old emperors of centralized control are returning to power after a brief but dizzying spell of Glorious Revolution. The free flow of code and information is being channeled once again in conventional directions, and the burst of innovation and media diversity that the Net produced over the past decade is regressing to the days of concentrated media oligarchies. "The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered," Lessig writes. "What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution."

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