摘要:The papers in this First Monday special issue were originally part of the final symposium of the research project ADAM ( Architecture Distribuée & Applications Multimédias , French acronym of Distributed Architectures and Multimedia Applications). This introduction elaborates on the issues at stake in the study of distributed network architectures beyond engineering sciences; it explores their political, social and legal implications and shows, by introducing the papers, the important challenges distributed architectures pose to our societies, economic systems, legal norms and collective behaviors.