Professor plans to take on political corruption

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lawrence Lessig famously battled Mickey Mouse before the Supreme Court. And lost.

But the fight illustrates how the Stanford law professor has played a pivotal role in shaping Internet law and in building a new approach to copyright rules in the digital era, whose spirit, after all, is the freedom of information.

For some 10 years, Lessig, 46, has spread the message that corporations such as Walt Disney Co. need to loosen their hold on popular culture. Crisscrossing the globe, he has delivered his lecture, called Free Culture, to students, high-tech executives, filmmakers and world leaders. The unassuming professor has become one of the most widely known evangelists on the subject, particularly in Silicon Valley.

But under the bright lights of Stanford's Memorial Auditorium last week, Lessig gave his last lecture on the subject. He is leaving the copyright fight to target another thorny issue: corruption in politics.

Lessig is in the early stages of conceptualizing how to tackle his new cause, but he believes one thing: It's not enough to depend on the president or the Supreme Court to enact change.

He hopes to take a page from the copyright fight and launch a grassroots movement. It would push political candidates to commit to three basic pledges: to abolish pork-barrel spending, to refuse to accept money from lobbyists and to finance their campaigns publicly.

"I have no idea if it will work," he said.

Lessig might be best known for his founding seven years ago of Creative Commons, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that has helped promote his open approach to copyright, a movement that has reached more than 40 countries. Photographers, for instance, can publish their pictures online under a "Creative Commons" license, which gives away some of the rights and allows others to use the photograph in certain contexts.

Lessig said he feels comfortable changing course now that the argument has been established and influential players such as YouTube and its owner, Google, have joined the ranks. Google, for instance, is in the process of creating a digital library of books and is facing a $1.65 billion piracy lawsuit from Viacom over copyrighted videos posted on YouTube.

Though Lessig doesn't advocate piracy, he has pushed to find a balance. He cited examples found on YouTube, playing a video mixing footage of President Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as though they were singing the duet "Endless Love." Such a creation shouldn't be considered criminal, he argued, because it is creating something new -- not to mention making a political statement.

"This is increasingly what literacy is for our kids," he said. It's "creating a perfect storm for culture. Just as technology frees this extraordinary opportunity for creativity, the law increasingly locks that opportunity down."

In 2002, Lessig took the copyright fight to the Supreme Court, where he argued that a law passed by Congress to extend the length of copyright was unconstitutional. He lost the case, but it spurred him to look for other solutions.

Appropriately enough, his last lecture on Jan. 31 was taped as part of a documentary film about the subject, "Basement Tapes: The Making of a Pirate Movie."

"It's really moved to the mainstream consciousness as a social issue, especially for young people," said Brett Gaylor, a 30-year-old filmmaker from Montreal. "It's up to the next round of people to carry that forward."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)