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:what about the good of the internet

[Watson Ladd]

...because big companies can profit off it. I suggest reading Empire by Negri and Hardt. One of their points is that a lot of the separate struggles for freedom have the same enemy, namely the interests of the propertied class.

Re:Change of focus? Sorta.

[kebes]

Quite right. Lessig specifically emphasizes this in his post:

I am someone who believes that a free society -- free of the "corruption" that defines our current society -- is necessary for free culture, and much more. For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.

I think he's done tremendous good. However during his work towards "sane copyright" he has seen how the system isn't able to work in the public's best interests. Having identified certain weaknesses in the current implementation of democracy, he's going to try to fix those problems. If those problems are fixed, then things like copyright reform (which is to the public's benefit) will come about naturally. So he's still very much working towards Free Culture. But as he says, a necessary condition for Free Culture is a non-corrupt (or less corrupt) legal system.

It's strange, though, because he is now tackling a problem that is much bigger and harder to solve. Rather than just get one set of laws fixed (copyright laws), he is now hoping to change all the laws that affect governance. Yet, he is undoubtedly right that without fundamental changes in the way governance occurs, any "wins" in other domains (be it copyright law, privacy, etc.) will be tenuous and short-lived.

Re:He's just widening his scope.

[BoberFett]

Myself for one. I think lobbying is very destructive in general, but it's never quite as cut-and-dried as "buying off" people. First of all, even with all the loopholes, it's very difficult for one donor to give enough money to a member of congress to severely sway them. I mean, these people are usually start out being comfortably well-off, even with the frequent pay cuts you get when you move from the private sphere to the public one.

Very few members of congress are going to let themselves be bought for a few thousand dollars. Just not worth it.

They're not being bought for a few thousands dollars during their term in office. They're being given lucrative positions after they leave office. That's the real payout.

Corruption is inherent in the system

[BobMcD]

I think we're too far gone, at this point, to fight corruption in our government.

Ten years isn't going to be enough. In ten years' time, all of us working together would hardly even make a dent in it. Take down one corrupt politician and there's an entire party's worth to take his or her place.

We could use a new system. Perhaps if we pushed more of the decisions to the people it would become too expensive to 'buy' support? Or perhaps we could ban parties names from anything printed by/endorsed by the government? Or perhaps merely instituting a 'removal-by-popular-constituant-vote' system would do...

I do not have an answer, but repairing the current system just doesn't seem like a good use of time and effort to me.