wjsullivan.net

On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copy-righted content. It is code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame.

  -- Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture"