The author of Unleashing the Killer App takes you on a guided tour of the gap between the outer edge of innovation and our ability to keep up with it. Ten years into the Internet revolution, it is painfully clear that one key element of the digital infrastructure has failed to develop. Our legal system, forged in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, is failing on a daily basis, threatening to shut down the entire enterprise. Every day brings new stories of expensive lawsuits, legislative battles and global regulatory disruptions that pit consumers against business, business against government, and property rights against information rules. Whether it's the civil disobedience of You Tube posters willfully ignoring intellectual property laws, a grassroots consumer movement determined to establish a new privacy order in a world of information transparency, or the rapidly-growing barter economy of 'open source', conflicts between old rules and new ways of living are accelerating. This is the Law of Disruption - the gap that opens up between technological breakthroughs and our ability to keep up. Larry Downes described it ten years ago in his bestselling book Unleashing the Killer App , and now he's back to tell us what we can do about it. In The Law of Disruption , Downes reveals how the rapid expansion of our virtual lives is dismantling the rusty infrastructure that governs them, even as a new version better suited to the unique features of the information economy is forming. The Law of Disruption, the natural by-product of information technology, reflects unstoppable forces that are changing the landscape of modern life. In the gap created by the Law of Disruption - between aspiration and engineering, individual rights and community needs, between the potential of entrepreneurs and the practicalities of the market - golden opportunities await those who move quickly. As the new geography of the information economy is being drawn, those with a good map will be far ahead. Here is that good map - for consumers, for business, and for government. Will you take advantage or be left behind?