It didn't take long for Harvard legal scholar Larry Lessig, the cofounder of Creative Commons, to drop his US presidency bid as a Democrat.

Lessig trumpeted himself as a sign of change in August. He said he was running "to build a mandate for the fundamental change our Democracy desperately needs." But now he's blaming the political system as his excuse for dropping out Monday. And this isn't the first time his political ambitions have flopped, either. In 2008, he said he was running for Congress in California, but he bailed on the bid after a pollster "convinced him he couldn't win."

His Monday announcement that he was dropping out, he said, was because the Democratic Party changed the rules that would make it impossible for him to participate in the party's debates—the next one is scheduled for November 14.

"It is now clear that the party won't let me be a candidate," he said in a video message. "I must today end my campaign for the Democratic nomination." Lessig, who has raised more than $1 million, said his "only chance" of getting known by the general public "was to be in those debates."

"I may be known to tiny corners in the tubes of the Internets, but I am not well-known to the American public generally," he said during his video announcement.

He thought he qualified for the debates, he said, after garnering at least 1 percent support in three national polls in the six weeks before the debate. Now he says the party changed the rule to require the same polling starting and ending six weeks before the debate.

"Unless we can time travel, there is no way that I will qualify," he said during a video announcement.

Lessig created a super PAC in 2014 in a bid to help fund candidates that backed reforming campaign finance. The Mayday PAC lost almost every race it was involved in.