American legal scholar and activist (born 1961)
Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Life and career.
Lessig was born on June 3, 1961, in Rapid City, South Dakota to Lester Lawrence "Jack" Lessig II (1929–2020) who was an engineer and Patricia "Pat" West Lessig (1930–2019), a real estate agent. He has two older step-siblings, Robert (died 2019) and Kitty, and a younger biological sister, Leslie. He grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 with a double degree BA in economics and a BS in management. He then studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving an MA in 1986. Lessig then returned to the United States to attend law school. He did his first year at the University of Chicago Law School before transferring to Yale Law School, and graduated in 1989 with a JD degree.
After graduation from law school, Lessig was a law clerk for Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1989 to 1990, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1990 to 1991.
Lessig started his academic career at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was professor from 1991 to 1997. As co-director of its Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe, he helped the newly independent Republic of Georgia draft a constitution. From 1997 to 2000, he was at Harvard Law School, holding for a year the chair of Berkman Professor of Law, affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet &amp; Society. He subsequently joined Stanford Law School, where he established the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
Lessig returned to Harvard in July 2009 as professor and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. In 2013, Lessig was appointed as the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard; his chair lecture was entitled "Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age."
Views.
Lessig is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. In 2001, he founded Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon and to share legally. Prior to his most recent appointment at Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center; the Washington, D.C. lobbying groups Public Knowledge and Free Press; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.
As a political activist, Lessig has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention. In May 2014, he launched a crowd-funded political action committee that he entitled, Mayday PAC, with the purpose of electing candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform. Lessig is also the co-founder of Rootstrikers, and is on the boards of MapLight and Represent.Us. He serves on the advisory boards of the "Democracy Café" and the Sunlight Foundation.
In August 2015, Lessig announced that he was exploring a possible candidacy for president of the United States, promising to run if his exploratory committee raised $1 million by Labor Day. After accomplishing this, on September 6, 2015, Lessig announced that he was entering the race to become a candidate for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Lessig described his candidacy as a referendum on campaign finance reform and electoral reform legislation. He stated that, if elected, he would serve a full term as president with his proposed reforms as his legislative priorities. He ended his campaign in November 2015, citing rule changes from the Democratic Party that precluded him from appearing in the televised debates.
Political background.
Lessig has emphasized in interviews that his study of philosophy at Cambridge radically changed his values and career path. Previously, he had held strong conservative or libertarian political views, desired a career in business, was a highly active member of Teenage Republicans, served as the 1978 youth governor for Pennsylvania through the YMCA Youth and Government program, and almost pursued a Republican political career.
Since studying philosophy at Cambridge in the mid-1980s, Lessig has been politically liberal. What was intended to be a year abroad at Cambridge convinced him instead to stay another two years to complete an undergraduate degree in philosophy and develop his changing political values. During this time, he also traveled in the Eastern Bloc, where he acquired a lifelong interest in Eastern European law and politics.
By the late 1980s, two influential conservative judges, Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia, selected him to serve as a law clerk, choosing him because they considered him brilliant, rather than for his ideology, and effectively making him the "token liberal" on their respective staffs. Later, Posner would call Lessig "the most distinguished law professor of his generation."
Lessig remains skeptical of government intervention, but favors some regulation, calling himself "a constitutionalist". On one occasion, Lessig also commended the John McCain campaign for discussing fair use rights in a letter to YouTube where it took issue with YouTube for indulging overreaching copyright claims that led to the removal of various campaign videos.
Internet and computer activism.
"Code is law".
In computer science, "code" typically refers to the text of a computer program (the source code). In law, "code" may refer to the texts that constitute statutory law. In his 1999 book entitled "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", Lessig explores the ways in which code can be instruments for social control in both senses, leading to his dictum that "Code is law". Lessig later updated his work in order to keep up with the prevailing views of the time and released the book as "" in December 2006.
Remix culture.
Lessig has been a proponent of the remix culture since the early 2000s. In his 2008 book entitled, "Remix", he presents this as a desirable cultural practice distinct from piracy. Lessig further articulates remix culture as intrinsic to technology and the Internet. Remix culture is therefore an amalgam of practice, creativity, "read/write" culture, and the hybrid economy.
According to Lessig, the problem with the remix comes when it is at odds with stringent U.S. copyright law. He has compared this to the failure of prohibition, both in its ineffectiveness and in its tendency to normalize criminal behavior. Instead he proposes more lenient licensing, namely Creative Commons licenses, as a remedy to maintain "rule of law" while combating plagiarism.
Free culture.
On March 28, 2004 Lessig was elected to the FSF board of directors. He proposed the concept of "free culture". He also supports free and open-source software and open spectrum. At his free culture keynote speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002, a few minutes of his speech was about software patents, which he views as a rising threat to free software, open source software, and innovation.
In March 2006, Lessig joined the board of advisors of the Digital Universe project. A few months later, Lessig gave a talk on the ethics of the Free Culture Movement at the 2006 Wikimania conference. In December 2006, his lecture "On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code" was one of the highlights at 23C3 "Who can you trust?".
According to Comedy Central, Lessig claimed in 2009 that because 70 percent of young people obtain digital information from illegal sources, laws should be changed.
In a foreword to the Freesouls book project, Lessig makes an argument in favor of amateur artists in the world of digital technologies: "there is a different class of amateur creators that digital technologies have ... enabled, and a different kind of creativity has emerged as a consequence".
Lessig is also a well-known critic of copyright term extensions.
Net neutrality.
Lessig has long been known to be a supporter of net neutrality. In 2006, he testified before the U.S. Senate that he believed Congress should ratify Michael Powell's four Internet freedoms and add a restriction to access-tiering, i.e., he does not believe content providers should be charged different amounts. The reason is that the Internet, under the neutral end-to-end design is an invaluable platform for innovation, and the economic benefit of innovation would be threatened if large corporations could purchase faster service to the detriment of newer companies with less capital. However, Lessig has supported the idea of allowing ISPs to give consumers the option of different tiers of service at different prices. He was reported on CBC News as saying that he has always been in favour of allowing internet providers to charge differently for consumer access at different speeds. He said, "Now, no doubt, my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong—that it doesn't go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is 'recent' is baseless. If I'm wrong, I've always been wrong."
Legislative reform.
Despite presenting an anti-regulatory standpoint in many fora, Lessig still sees the need for legislative enforcement of copyright. He has called for limiting copyright terms for creative professionals to five years, but believes that since many of them are independent, the work of creative professionals would become more easily and quickly available if a bureaucratic procedure were introduced to renew trademarks for up to 75 years after this five-year term.
Lessig has repeatedly taken a stance that privatization through legislation such as that seen in the 1980s in the UK with British Telecommunications is not the best way to help the Internet grow. He said, "When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place", "My claim is that we should focus on the values of liberty. If there is not government to insist on those values, then who?" "The single unifying force should be that we govern ourselves."
Legal challenges.
From 1999 to 2002, Lessig represented a high-profile challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Working with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Lessig led the team representing the plaintiff in "Eldred v. Ashcroft". The plaintiff in the case was joined by a group of publishers who frequently published work in the public domain and a large number of "amici" including the Free Software Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Bureau of National Affairs, and the College Art Association.
In March 2003, Lessig acknowledged severe disappointment with his Supreme Court defeat in the Eldred copyright-extension case, where he unsuccessfully tried to convince Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had sympathies for de-regulation, to back his "market-based" approach to intellectual property regulation.
In August 2013, Lawrence Lessig brought suit against Liberation Music PTY Ltd., after Liberation issued a takedown notice of one of Lessig's lectures on YouTube that had used the song "Lisztomania" by the band Phoenix, whom Liberation Music represents. Lessig sought damages under section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which holds parties liable for misrepresentations of infringement or removal of material. Lessig was represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jones Day. In February 2014, the case ended with a settlement in which Liberation Music admitted wrongdoing in issuing the takedown notice, issued an apology, and paid a confidential sum in compensation.
"Killswitch".
In October 2014, "Killswitch", a film featuring Lawrence Lessig, as well as Aaron Swartz, Tim Wu, and Edward Snowden received its World Premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Editing. In the film, Lessig frames the story of two young hacktivists, Swartz and Snowden, who symbolize the disruptive and dynamic nature of the Internet. The film reveals the emotional bond between Lessig and Swartz, and how it was Swartz (the mentee) who challenged Lessig (the mentor) to engage in the political activism that has led to Lessig's crusade for campaign finance reform.
In February 2015, "Killswitch" was invited to be screened at the