should be completely unprotected. I am not an opponent of protection,
where protection is properly justified. My aim is not to argue against systems
of control generally. It is simply to resist a mistaken inference: that if some
control is good, then more control must be better.

///\\\

My aim in this chapter has been twofold. The first part has been to intro-
duce the idea of open code and to demonstrate how it operates at the con-
tent layer to inspire a wide range of innovation. It does this both for the
reasons that technologists give -- it is fast, cheap, and powerful -- and for rea-
sons that are too often missed. By offering to the world a wide range of code
and hence coding resources, open code lowers the barriers to entry for in-
novators.[4-60] By building a neutral platform, open code invites a different kind
of innovation. By protecting that neutral platform, both through licenses
and through distributed source code, the system assures developers that the
platform will remain neutral in the future.

This feature of open code, however, is not limited to code. The lesson of
open code extends to other content as well. As we will see when we consider
the law of copyright, this balance between free and controlled resources is
precisely the balance that the law must strike in intellectual property con-
texts generally. And while our intuition is that more control produces more
innovation, this commons among the wired suggests at least that the story is
more complex. Less control over code at the content layer has arguably pro-
duced more innovation and development of this code. Keeping this re-
source in a commons increases the value of the resource -- both because
others can draw upon this resource and because it mitigates the number
of strategic games played by others. We will see something more of these
strategic games in Chapter 11.

[[72]]

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