Law Commons^™

Climbing The Walls Of Your Electronic Cage, Steven Hetcher

Michigan Law Review

Space. The final frontier. Not so, say the doyennes of the firstgeneration Internet community, who view themselves as the new frontiersmen and women staking out a previously unexplored territory - cyberspace. Numerous metaphors in the Internet literature picture cyberspace as a new, previously unexplored domain. Parallels are frequently drawn to the American colonies, the Western frontier, or outer space. In Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig says, "Cyberspace is a place. People live there." In this place, we will build a "new society" (p. 4). A sense of this background is helpful in appraising Lessig's claims. He argues …