Steal This Show

In this episode, we meet Primavera De Filippi, author of the recently published ‘Blockchain and the Law (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976429&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) ‘, from Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright). Primavera is interested in how the law will change to accommodate blockchain — and how blockchain might replace parts of the law. We’ve already seen how P2P filesharing strained the world’s copyright law: what changes will be ushered in by P2P money? We discuss the future of blockchain-based technologies, and whether decentral systems are doomed to create new incumbents and new forms of centralisation; whether (and how) forking could be a solution against this ‘re-centralisation’; and how Ethereum’s smart contracts may have a fatal flaw that the philosophy of law already knows about. Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet &