Technology is a double-edged sword

What isn't? Stone, Knife, Wealth, Beauty, etc. With no exception, they are all double-edge swords.
What new insights Steven Levey's "Tech's double-edged sword" can tell us?

"The more powerful our tools are, the more dangerous they are when turned against us"- very true!

Lawrence Lessig discusses the phenomenon of internet, how it was like a shooting star, flaring across the night sky and disappearing just as unexpectedly. It suggests that the new laws and regulations is dismantling the very architecture that allows internet a framework for global innovation.

Lessig discusses the notion of commons, the resources that everybody has equal access, and is not controlled and regulated, unlike other private and owned properties. What is the role of commons in our society? What does commons do to a culture? (it reminds me of a particular way of thinking of places: some are designed to distinguish, others are designed to remove distinctions. High profile places targeted one kind of consumers, the wealthy, powerful and famous. Other places, such as a coffee houses are more widely accessible. It is not which is better. I believe we need both to exist. ) for traditional physical resources, limiting commons makes sense, because individuals might over-consume resources and lead to depletion, but there are particular kinds of resources that are not subject to this rule, such as knowledge, music, poems, and now the software. The resources will not decrease when someone gets a copy. This insight of the distinction between software property and others is important!

He talks about the internet as composed of several layers, the physical, code/internet/logical, and the content. Neither the physcial layer (computers, cables) nor the content are resources of commons, only the middle layer is!

"This balance of control and freedom produced an unprecedented explosion in innovation. The power, and hence the right, to innovate was essentially decentralized. "

"This history should be a lesson. Every significant innovation on the Internet has emerged outside of
traditional providers."Patent regulation, although was designed to spur innovation, maybe in the end do harms to innovation. Because it is taxing to apply for patent, which means only those who are powerful like big companies can afford the tax to do it. "The law becomes a tool to assure that new innovations don't displace old ones"

"the right to compensation shouldn't translate into the power to control innovation."