Exploring the confluence of policy, technology, and art at Google’s New York office, Lessig keeps the long tail in a ferocious headlock just long enough to explain why it’s too narrow.
Just for fun, let’s blaze through the back story in one sentence: Born June 3, 1961 in Rapid City, South Dakota, Lawrence Lessig copped Economics and Management (Wharton School) degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, nabbed an M.A. in Philosophy from Cambridge, romanced a Law degree from Yale, taught at Harvard, clerked for judge Richard Posner (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals) and Justice Antonin Scalia (United States Supreme Court), gloriously lost a Supreme Court challnge to the Sonny Bono Act, co-composed an Amici Brief defending 2600 in “MPAA vs. 2600,” cofounded Creative Commons, served on the EFF‘s board, received the 2002 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joined the Digital Universe project’s board of advisors, completed four books and did a bunch of other stuff before considering a bid for Congress in 2006 and wisely deciding to pass.
Professor Lesssig explains Creative Commons licensing.
Instead, the long-time Wired contributor decided to sideline his eternal battle with the forces of IP extremism and focus for a while on corruption in Congress–one reason our elected representatives would be wise to slam-dunk him ASAP into a position where they won’t be such easy targets. After all, here’s a guy who devotes a major chunk of the last decade to IP issues and gets called “the philosopher-king of Internet law,” the Elvis of cyberflow,” and “a prophet for the Internet age.” Now that his temporarily final argument for sane intellectual property policy (a finalist for the 2008 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book Award) is on the shelves (with a free electronic version just around the corner), he’ll soon be at liberty to let Capitol Hill’s business-class lap dogs and their masters feel the full weight of his massively formidable analytical apparatus, horrifically encyclopedic knowledge, and near-irresistible powers of persuasion. This is something no sane person could want. Over the next few weeks we’ll occasionally look at some of Lessig’s biggest ideas and how–if he’s offered a place on the Commission and accepts–they might help shape our media environment.
Lessig talks Obama.
