Ask Lawrence Lessig About Life And Law Online

Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, and before that of various other places, is one of the best-known voices in the world of electronic freedoms. Lessig's new book, The Future of Ideas, is the latest work of many in his efforts to illuminate and create a freer world online. Lessig has agreed to answer your questions; please be courteous by limiting your questions to one per post.

More info on the Bono Act

[yerricde]

Here's some more information about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act:

• Wikipedia article [wikipedia.com] to which I contributed
• Everything 2 article [everything2.com] that I wrote
• Eldred v. Ashcroft [harvard.edu], a lawsuit to overturn the Bono Act
• House directory [house.gov] and Senate directory [senate.gov]: whom to fax if you want this law repealed. Yes, fax. E-mail is assumed to be spam, while paper mail is assumed to carry anthrax.

Re:Activism by coding

[ninewands]

English, is by its nature, extremely poorly suited for an exercise such as this. A large portion of the meaning of an English statement is derived from context and the order of words in a statement, while the meaning of a C, Pascal or Fortran expression is almost purely a matter of syntax. I believe that it would be extremely difficult to write a compiler or interpreter that could process nature-looking English into computer code.

OTOH, there is already a "natural-language" programming language available for a project such as this ... Perl! Don't laugh yet.

Damian Conway's paper, Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century [monash.edu.au] demonstrates that "natural language" programming IS possible in a quasi-grammatical way, while also pointing out WHY English really just doesn't fit the needs of a programming language. The "Latin" code that results from using Lingua::Romana::Perligata is "sort of" grammatically correct, quite readable, although somewhat "forced", to those with a grounding in the Classics (which many judges have), and lacking a LOT of the special characters that make most programming languages look mysterious to non-techies.

You'll have to read the paper to see the effect of using the module ... the lameness filter stopped me from including any of Conway's examples.

I don't claim to be enough of a Perl hacker to even begin trying to convert one of the perl versions of DeCSS to a Perligata script, but I feel I know enough linguistics to consider an attempt to create an English-based "natural language programming language" that would come CLOSE to being grammatically correct and comprehensible to non-programmers to be quixotic.

Re:.NET-enabled futures?

[cnkeller]

I believe that's what it's called - the one being developed by AOL and other companies to counter .NET

Isn't the liberty alliance trying to combat passport? .NET is microsoft's counter to Java (at least according to their whitepapers). It's a development suite, etc. If I recall, it doesn't really have anything to do with a one stop shop for personal information (which is passport and liberty), other than Passport might be re-implemented with .NET tools.