Lawrence Lessig to Leave Copyright Sphere

brandonY writes "The founder of Creative Commons, the Stanford lawyer behind the 'Eldred v. Ashcroft' case, and the author of 'Code' has spent the last 10 years working tirelessly on behalf of limited copyright terms, net neutrality, and the public domain. Tuesday, Lawrence Lessig announced on his blog that he has "decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism" from fighting the good fight for the public domain to fighting the good fight against corruption and the influence of big money's effects on legislation in general."

Comments

Re:He's just widening his scope.

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

Here's 50 "donations" to start with:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/topindivs.asp?ID=D 000000128&ContribID=U0000000007&Display=ID

More:
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp2.asp ?txtName=Walt+Disney+Co&txtUltOrg=y&txtCycle=2005& txtSort=name

http://www.opensecrets.org/ is full of such records of "donations" made on behalf of Disney.
And that's just one website.

Now ask for something hard to find.
;)

Re:I hate to be negative...

[kbielefe]

I've yet to see it seriously discussed

This is a surprising comment to me, given the general political awareness and libertarian leanings on slashdot. Not only has it been seriously discussed, it has been implemented in places. In Arizona, for example, statewide candidates have the option to run publicly funded campaigns due to an initiative that passed a few years ago. They must collect a certain number of $5 donations to qualify, then they get a set amount for the primary, and another set amount for the general election. If someone decides to go the private-funded route, whatever money they raise is matched dollar for dollar in the public fund.

There are a number of glaring problems with it:

• Freedom of speech issues. Think of the politician you most despise. Now imagine being forced to contribute to his or her campaign.
• The amounts were too small to mount effective campaigns, providing barely enough for one mailer and maybe one late-night TV commercial. This gives a huge advantage to candidates with more name recognition. Taxpayers wouldn't support any higher amounts.
• If you want enough money to actually get your message out, you have to go the private route, with the matching system effectively raising funds for your opponent.
• It creates all sorts of bizarre conditions on when money can be spent. For example, how to account for resources that are used from pre-announcement through post-election, like a web site.
• There is no time for violations to be sorted out in the courts before the election happens. Therefore, if someone breaks the rules to gain an unfair advantage, there is no remedy until after the election, and no way to determine if it would have affected the outcome. With the small amount of funds, violations that would otherwise be insignificant play a much bigger part.

Re:One step beyond

[adelord]

Are you referring to the fractional reserve banking system as the source of new money? I just recently came across that, thanks to someone's sig line on here, which pointed to the "Money as Debt" instructional animation at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-905047436 2583451279 which is incredibly illuminating. It did take me a few weeks to prove to myself that it isn't bullshit though, and it helped that I have a friend who loan officer at a bank and he believes in the current system. He played a great devil's advocate.