Jonathan_Zittrain: Yea; I devote some of Chapter Eight to saying that patents are out of control. But I mostly cite to all the other scholars who say that with greater depth than I. Most of the book I've tried to make cover new ground, which also means that it's a little uneven -- for example I don't talk all that much about net neutrality, since that debate is already so thoroughly met.

dreamworld: You devote a whole chapter to the future of privacy on the Net, but in the end you seem to assert that consumer privacy will be better protected by MySpace pages, blogs and wikis than more traditional means. Why is that?

Jonathan_Zittrain: Well, I think that privacy is best protected through norms than through trying to make everything into a lawsuit. I acknowledge the very real problems that come up when armies of the world's tourists are producing images and feeding them into Flickr and Facebook stamped with time, date, location, and identity of the people in the photo -- far more intrusive than CCTV here in Britain! So I propose ways to convey social cues along with the raw data of something like a photo. Let Star Wars Kid say early: Hey, I don't approve of this; it was an accident it got online, please forward a cat doing something funny instead of this to your friends... please? How many, if they saw that before forwarding Star Wars Kid onward, would respect those wishes? The answer tells us whether we're ready to govern ourselves and see the Net as the social phenomenon that it is, not just a big pile of stuff to copy and paste.

dusty6649: Do you think the day will ever come when there will be a program that is capable of putting a stop to all hackers or I should say a quick fix?

Jonathan_Zittrain: Nope, no magic bullets, except in the appliance. And that way lies a cauterization of what I think is most valuable about the Net and PC. How do they put it? The price of freedom is eternal vigilance! We just need some new tools to help those who want to help. Some binoculars and walkie-talkies for the Neighborhood Watch.

Beregond: Would you consider appliances the answer to the prayers of those who run (or advocate) a closed or controlled society?

Jonathan_Zittrain: You bet. The Chinese gov't no doubt loves some of the tools we've developed in that category: car navigation systems with microphones that can be secretly and remotely turned on; DVRs that can have content retroactively excised if it's found to be objectionable.