A Declaration FOR IndependenceJuly 28, 2008 - by Donny Shaw
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and Creative Commons
founder who has decided to spend the next ten years working to
Change Congress, released a first draft of his basic argument.
It explains why only 9% of Americans approve of the job Congress
is doing and offers a plan to rebuild the public’s trust. Here’s
an excerpt: >The point is not that money is evil. Or that rich
people should be silenced or forbidden to speak. The point
instead is about the mechanisms by which trust gets built. It is
about the importance of independence within those mechanisms: If
you tell me a professor was paid to write a policy paper, I’m
less interested in his argument. If a lawyer at a major firm
offers his expert advice about how copyright protections should
be extended, I want to know who the clients of his firm are. If
I learned that a doctor prescribing a new cancer drug to my mom
was a patent holder on that drug, I’d ask for a second opinion.
And if my Co