Lessig Bows Out

So it turns out that copyright-guru/wine track messiah Lawrence Lessig isn’t running for Tom Lantos’ congressional seat after all.  As I suspected, he consulted some pollsters and realized that he’d be crushed by Jackie Speier, who has been representing the South Bay Area since decades before I was born. What Lessig did may have been perfect.  Had he actually ran and gotten crushed, his message on political reform and copyright would have been associated with taking an electoral beating.  This way, he got a decent amount of media attention from outside his hard core supporters.  More people know who Lessig is and what he wants to do.  Ultimately, this is a net positive for him.  Perhaps he could be appointed to the FCC by Obama…that would certainly shake things up in a productive way.

More Lessig

Julian Sanchez has an interview with Lawrence Lessig in Ars Technica that outlines more concretely what he hopes to do in Congress.  While he is “liberal Demcorat” and “a free-trade, pro-market liberal”, the one thing that would set him apart from just about any Congressperson would be the main focus of his legislative push - the internet.

“Silicon Valley needs a representative who can speak for the interests of the Internet, of making it flourish,” he says. “As we’re leading into this moment when the owners of telecommunications platforms are trying to leverage their ownership into control of the Internet, yammering about the need to turn it into the old Bell System, we need someone in Washington who’s going to be able to stare them down.”

But while Lessig wryly notes that the RIAA and MPAA “won’t be excited to have an opponent of extremist copyright legislation in Congress,” he also stresses that a congressional run would not be some kind of crusading extension of his work on “free culture.” For Lessig, the central policy question will be, “Who ultimately controls innovation on the Internet? That’s the net neutrality fight; that’s the open spectrum fight.”

Spectrum licensing, copyright law and telecom is one of those bundles of complex legislative issues that doesn’t have a ton of a bunch of energized activists who can successfully push legislators - even Democrats - to taking anything besides the industry line.  Simple public choice logic basically dictates that in a world where all the pressure on telecom regulation and copyright is coming from one side with a bunch of money, it’s their interests that will be represented in the government.

What compounds this logic is that these issues are very complex and it’s not always clear what the correct liberal line on them are.  When it’s hard to build up the expertise necessary to oppose smart, wealthy, telecom interests, it’s basically a rigged game for bad, corporate driven telecom and copyright policy.  Lessig, on the other hand, has all the money and influence and fame he needs, and has built up his entire reputation and platform on being incorruptible and is the most informed on these issues and has a grassroots following with which he can actually build up some popular support on these obscure regulatory issues.

There really aren’t any other congressional candidates like this. And because you’re reading this blog, you care about the Internet and the free-flow and transmission of content (have I mentioned that he’s the CEO of Creative Commons), so you should check out his site and give him some cash.

Putting Your Money Where My Mouth Is

After I wrote about Lawrence Lessig and linked to his ActBlue page, I got an email from ActBlue that encouraged me to set up my own fundraising page for Lessig. I was at first skeptical but, and credit to ActBlue’s designers, it was incredibly simple. So here is my Lessig fundraising page. If any of you are inclined to trust my judgment on a candidate who hasn’t even declared that he’s running with literally zero electoral or political experience outside of clerking for Scalia and Richard Posner, then please please give.

Allow me to be serious for a second. Lessig will be the smartest man in Congress, the most thoughtful, the least tied down to any interest group and the only one who’s been a true visionary on the crucially important and often ignored issue of copyright and free culture. Oh yeah, and he’s the CEO of creative commons, meaning that any blogger who regularly uses photos from Flikr is indebted to him.

Here’s Lessig’s exploratory committee website.

Here’s his blog

Wikipedia

Wired profile from 2002 covering his litigation is Eldred vs Ashcroft.

Lessig As Obama Writ Large

As a young man who spends a fair amount of time on the internet and who both uses and produces content, it’s not surprise that I view Lawrence Lessig as a secular saint.  So, I joined the Facebook group, signed up for his email list and will now link to his exploratory committee website.  He would be running in Tom Lantos’ district against state senator Jackie Speier, a lifetime Democratic politician who was represented the San Mateo/San Francisco in the State Assembly and Senate since 1984.  She has racked up both legislative experience and the support of all the local Democratic elites and party bigwigs, including Lantos himself before he died.

Lessig, on the other hand, has no political or governmental experience besides clerking for Antonin Scalia and Richard Posner.   He has been an academic all of his life and, as you all should know, he basically started the free culture movement on his own. He’s spent the last ten or so years lecturing and giving presentations on the corruption and distortions of copyright law and is a folk hero among tech types.  Before this talk of a congressional bid started, Lessig made waves in the blogosphere for supporting Barack Obama and his tech policy.  Obama was even able to get constant-critic Matt Stoller to gush over his views on tech and his support from Lessig.

The connection between Obama and Lessig is hardly accidental.  Lessig is in many ways the ur-Obama.  Obama, as we’ve heard over and over again, draws much of his support from highly educated, young, wealthy voters.  Lessig fans almost consist exclusively of that wine-track core of the Obama coalition.  Franky, the only people who really care about copyright or free culture are the highly educated, young and wealthy.  Obama is often thought of as being too cerebral and inspiring and lacking experience.  While these claims are overblown with Obama, they’re almost too true of Lessig.  Lessig is incredibly cerebral — both him and Obama were law professors — and has built up this huge and devoted fan base by giving speeches and power point presentations about a fairly obscure subject.

Like Obama, Lessig’s candidate would be a female politician who has been working in the trenches of Democratic politics for decades and who many view as deserving of the Congressional spot.  She is the “establishment” candidate, much more than Clinton, and is viewed by some progressives as tainted by her experience and corporate connections.  The complaints that Erica Jong and many feminists make that Obama is a babe-in-the-woods who would never get such a free pass against an equally qualified male candidate will only be amplified for Lessig.  Lessig has no experience, Speier has experience in spades.  And Lessig, much like Obama, will probably be side-stepping these claims of experience by saying that he is part of a movement to establish good government and a change in how citizens participate in government.  He would, of course, be making the claim that his judgment is better than Speier’s.  Unlike Obama, Lessig would get next-to-no support from blacks or really any other traditional Democratic voting block, except wine-track liberals.

Lessig would probably be able to instantly raise a huge amount of money from his fans all over the country - like Obama.  And while he would be able to draw very few traditional Democratic votes from Speier, he could probably get lots young and tech-oriented people who don’t usually vote to support him. And while he probably won’t win, he’d certainly be a sensation that could draw attention to the issues he’s spent years highlighting.

As a wine-track, good government, cerebral, young, Obama supporting, self-identified liberal from a well-offish family and who has aspirations of higher education, of course I’m a Lessig supporter.  So get over to his website and give him some cash.