I have also not tried to enumerate the mistakes, real and alleged, made in the first edition. Some I’ve simply corrected, and some I’ve kept, because, however mistaken others take them to be, I continue to believe that they are not mistakes. The most important of the second type is my view that the infrastructure of the Net will become increasingly controlled and regulable through digital identity technologies. Friends have called this “mistake” a “whopper.” It is not. I’m not sure what time horizon I had in mind in 1999, and I concede that some of the predictions made there have not come to pass—yet. But I am more confident today than I was then, and thus I have chosen to stick with this “fundamental mistake.” Perhaps this is simply to hedge my bets: If I’m right, then I have the reward of understanding. If I’m wrong, then we’ll have an Internet closer to the values of its original design.
The genesis of the revisions found here was a wiki. Basic Books allowed me to post the original edition of the book in a wiki hosted by Jotspot, and a team of “chapter captains” helped facilitate a conversation about the text. There were some edits to the text itself, and many more valuable comments and criticisms.1 I then took that text as of the end of 2005 and added my own edits to produce this book. While I wouldn’t go as far as the musician Jeff Tweedy (“Half of it’s you, half is me”), an important part of this is not my work. In recognition of that, I’ve committed the royalties from this book to the nonprofit Creative Commons. I am grateful to JotSpot (<jot.com>) for donating the wiki and hosting services that were used to edit Code v1. That wiki was managed by an extraordinary Stanford undergraduate, Jake Wachman, who gave this project more time than he had. Each chapter of the book, while living on the wiki, had a “chapter captain.” I am grateful to each of them—Ann Bartow, Richard Belew, Seth Finkelstein, Joel Flynn, Mia Garlick, Matt Goodell, Paul Gowder, Peter Harter, Brian Honermann, Brad Johnson, Jay Kesan, John Logie, Tom Maddox, Ellen Rigsby, and Jon Stewart—for the work they volunteered to do, and to the many volunteers who spent their time trying to make Code v1 better. I am especially grateful to Andy Oram for his extensive contributions to the wiki. In addition to these volunteers, Stanford helped me gather an army of law students to help complete the research that Code v2 required. This work began with four—David Ryan Brumberg, Jyh-An Lee, Bret Logue, and Adam Pugh—who spent a summer collecting all the work that built upon or criticized Code v1. I relied upon that research in part to decide how to modify Code v1. During the fall semester, 2005, a seminar of Stanford students added their own critical take, as well as classes at Cardozo Law School. And then during the year, two other students, John Eden and Avi Lev Robinson-
