Straight from the horse's mouth

Earlier this month, the work of UTS Professor David Lindsay was celebrated with a public lecture and a full-day symposium. Not that Lindsay was entirely happy about it. ‘This is all entirely unnecessary and hugely embarrassing,’ he told attendees, some of whom had flown in from the US, New Zealand, South Australia, Queensland and Victoria. He said he’d tried to dissuade the organisers from running the event. ‘But they were only encouraged by my reticence.’

What a good thing the organisers persisted. On Thursday night, the celebration opened with Lindsay’s provocative lecture on AI and copyright. Then, on Friday, a series of leading academics discussed their research in the context of Lindsay’s scholarship. Also on Friday, Lindsay sat down for a conversation with Emerita Professor Jill McKeough.

Talk soon turned to the ‘law of the horse’. As Lindsay explained, the phrase had been at the heart of a disagreement between Judge Frank Easterbrook and law scholar Lawrence Lessig. In 1996, Judge Easterbrook argued that the internet required no new law. Indeed, developing a ‘law of cyberspace’ would be as ridiculous as developing a ‘law of the horse’. Rather, judges, lawyers and technologists should be left to work through problems using existing general law.

Lessig replied with his 1999 paper: ‘The Law Of The Horse: What cyberlaw might teach’. He argued that cyberspace did need specific legal attention. ‘I am not defending the law of the horse,’ Lessig wrote. ‘My claim is specific to cyberspace.’ Lessig went on to refine these ideas in his book Code, later updated in Code: version 2.0, an illuminating experiment in participatory co-authorship. Lessig argued that four regulatory modalities governed the internet: social norms; market forces; the code of software architecture; and the code of the law.

Apart from revisiting the law of the horse debate, Lindsay also revisited his pre-academic work as an environmental activist in the 1980s, as nuclear disarmament coordinator at Greenpeace. ‘We were well and truly talking about climate change in the 1980s,’ he said. And his commitment to digital rights such as privacy has proved just as enduring. ‘Privacy is the pre-eminent right in the digital age, at the centre of human rights and collective rights. It’s essentially about autonomy and dignity.’

Throughout the celebration, ideas were flying. The notion of AI as an ‘incoherent concept’; the concerning collaboration between Quantium and Woolies; the pitfalls of neophilia. As Lindsay said, ‘Academics aren’t always listened to, but it’s important to make that contribution.’

 
References: 

Easterbrook, Frank H. (1996) ‘Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse.’ U. Chi. Legal F.: 207. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2147&context=journal_articles 

Lessig, Lawrence (1999), ‘The Law Of The Horse: What cyberlaw might teach’, Harvard Law Review. https://cyber.harvard.edu/works/lessig/finalhls.pdf 

Lessig, Lawrence (2006), Code: Version 2.0, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Code_v2.pdf