Peer-to-peer as a design principle for law: distribute the law

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (1)

1 ISCC - Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS

This article positions itself beyond the tension between copyright enforcement to preserve business models vs users' rights to access knowledge which are required to enjoy the opportunities provided by the disruptive technology. Instead of only applying law to peer-to-peer in order to control networks, and without implying that because a law is currently unenforceable, it should not exist, I propose to consider another angle of the relationship between law and technology, by applying peer-to-peer to the law, to introduce the argument of the distribution of law itself. Peer-to-peer technologies disrupting established economic models and legal categories could also inspire an evolution of the law as a regulatory system in order to integrate some of their technical features. This will lead to another kind of relationship between law and technology: after the control of technology by the law, which absorbs the new technology by expanding its scope of application, and in addition to the scholarship on regulation by code or of code (Lessig 2006; Brown & Marsden 2013) the law itself can try to integrate the technology. It might do so by reconfiguring its internal 'operating system' and shuffling the categories a bit more, instead of simply inflating them by adding an exception to the existing system.

Mots clés: legal thinking; peer-to-peer; copyright; community wireless networks; distributed law; network science; agency of collectives; digital commons; property; liability; design

Domaines: Science politique; Droit; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. Peer-to-peer as a design principle for law: distribute the law. Journal of Peer Production, 2015, Disruption and the Law, Issue #6, pp.1-9. ⟨halshs-01103885⟩