High Noon on the Electronic Frontier

foreword by Mike Godwin
."..The two sides of the dispute appear in dueling essays as part of a massive collection, titled "High Noon on the Electronic Frontier," edited by Peter Ludlow and coming in June from The MIT Press. I hate the title, but this collection covers many timely issues, such as property rights, computer crime and cryptography. If you make your living by writing code, you have to read this book."
-- Peter Coffee, "PC Week" Peter Ludlow has culled from various sources, both print and electronic, key articles on hot cyberspace policy issues, together with lively extracts from online discussions of these issues. These include the standard academic pieces along with "rants and manifestos" on a broad range of issues from the denizens of cyberspace and reflect the discourse of cyberspace itself. At times they have what Ludlow terms "a certain gonzo quality, " but nonetheless they raise serious conceptual issues in a way that illustrates precisely what is at stake. The topics covered in this timely compilation include privacy, property rights, hacking and cracking, encryption, censorship, and self and community on-line.

The writings/discussions: John Perry Barlow · "Wine Without Bottles" Simson L. Garfinkel, Richard M. Stallman, and Mitchell Kapor · "Why Software Patents Are Bad" The League for Programming Freedom · "Against Software Patents" Paul Heckel · "Debunking the Software Patent Myths" Pirate editorial · "So You Want to Be a Pirate?" Mike Godwin · "Some "Property" Problems in a Computer Crime Prosecution" The Mentor · "The Conscience of a Hacker" Julian Dibbell · "ThePrisoner: Phiber Optik Goes Directly to Jail" Dorothy E. Denning · "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computer

Mike Godwin is a Policy Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for American Lawyer magazine.