Lessig moves on

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible interest.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

June 23, 2007
What's Online
Tech Missionary Shifts Focus
By DAN MITCHELL

HIS ideas and opinions aside, nobody has done more than Lawrence 
Lessig to help people understand the profound effects of 
technology on the laws governing intellectual property. He is, as 
Wired magazine called him in 2002, "the Elvis of cyberlaw" 
(wired.com)

But now, Mr. Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, is 
leaving the building, or at least the room. "I have decided to 
shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the 
issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years," he announced 
this week on his blog (lessig.org/blog) and last week in a speech 
at the iCommons Summit in Croatia (available via youtube.com).

His new mission, for at least the next decade, he says, is to 
combat the influence of money on politics, which yields bad laws 
- and not just the bad laws governing intellectual property.

"Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests 
can provide," he wrote. "In the United States, listening to money 
is the only way to secure re-election. And so an economy of 
influence bends public policy away from sense, always to 
dollars."

[SNIP]

Which brings us back to Mr. Lessig's new mission. He is not 
"leaving the movement," he insisted. "But I have come to believe 
that until a more fundamental problem is fixed, the movement 
can't succeed either."

copyright 2007