Lawrence Lessig is known for his work at the interface between technology and law. Why is he shifting his focus to corruption?

WHEN working as a clerk in the early 1990s for Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice, a twenty-something law graduate became frustrated by the limitations of the creaking mainframe technology used by the court to publish its rulings—a system called Atex that is well known to veteran journalists. So he and another clerk made a presentation about the virtues of personal computers to the Supreme Court's technology committee. The verdict from its chairman, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, was swift. “I want PCs on everyone's desk on Monday,” she ruled. This was more than a one-time judicial victory. The incident also hinted at a legal career in which Lawrence Lessig—today one of America's leading cyberlaw experts—would always argue on the side of technological progress.

Today the 46-year-old is a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of its Centre for Internet and Society. He is also a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a internet lobby group, an avid blogger and a prolific columnist. He is the driving force behind Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation that promotes the use of copyright licences that encourage the sharing of creative works, extending the principles of open-source software into other fields. But ultimately Mr Lessig's real skill is bridging the gap between law and technology, encapsulated in his dictum “code is law”.

Mr Lessig has concentrated for a decade on copyright law and its interaction with the internet. So he left some people feeling confused earlier this year when he announced a new focus for his campaigning efforts: tackling corruption. Not everyone understood that this change in academic and activist emphasis is more of a shift in strategy than in substance.

For years Mr Lessig has presented legal arguments against excessive copyright extensions. But he says lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realise that counter-arguments to copyright extensions exist. Even though Britain's Gowers Review, published in 2005, argues against such extensions, and eminent economists such as the late Milton Friedman have declared the importance of copyright limits to be a “no brainer”, Mr Lessig says legislators are clueless about “an issue that any rational policymaker has no problem understanding.” Swayed by campaign contributions from vested interests—such as film studios, music companies and book publishers—America's Congress has lengthened copyright terms 11 times in the past four decades, he observes.

And Mr Lessig sees the same sorts of interference in other domains, such as the influence of sugar lobbies on government nutrition boards and that of pharmaceutical lobbies on doctors. “I felt I was spending too much time on the substance of copyright, as if that was the issue,” he says with palpable frustration. “I'm really getting tired of telling this story. It's not rocket science. But governments always get it wrong. What links these issues is that there is so much money involved in protecting them.”

Technically legal

To use an analogy from the world of computing, having failed to get a piece of software (copyright law) to run properly, Mr Lessig believes that the problem is caused by flaws in the underlying operating system (the political process). He has yet to reveal exactly how he hopes to expose and reduce the inappropriate influence of money on important matters such as copyright law and health—something that, it must be said, he is hardly the first to attempt. But it is sure to involve a big dose of technology. Mr Lessig's work has always been inextricably linked with it, whether teaching law students, writing books or promoting innovation. It all began when he learned to program on a mainframe computer as a high-school student in Pennsylvania. After that, he recalls, “I started buying things at Radio Shack and began tinkering.”

There was no question, however, of this hobby becoming a full-time career. Years before, during the Watergate scandal, Mr Lessig's uncle had inspired him to pursue law. Richard Cates, the associate special general counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Richard Nixon's impeachment hearings, told his nephew that law was the only place where reason controls power. Though Mr Lessig's later battle to reverse copyright extensions suggested otherwise, the young man decided that law was the career for him.

He remained wedded to this choice even as his views in other areas changed. A church-going Protestant who belonged to the National Teen Age Republicans, Mr Lessig was the youngest member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the 1980 Republican Convention. After studying economics and management at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Mr Lessig entered Cambridge University in England as an economics scholar—his strongest chance at gaining admission, he calculated—but with no intention of taking a degree in economics. “It was a total bait and switch,” he says, with a rare grin of mischievousness. Instead Mr Lessig ended up taking a degree in philosophy.

“Copyrights will not expire so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.”

While in Europe he travelled several times to the Soviet Union, at times smuggling in heart-valves for Jewish refuseniks. Today Mr Lessig may complain that “the Democratic Party excessively listens to Hollywood” on copyright issues, but he is no longer the fervent Republican of his teenage years. He is a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union, quotes Al Gore and bemoans how far George Bush has strayed from the constitutional powers granted to him.

After returning to America and attending law school at Yale, Mr Lessig began his legal career. He worked as a clerk for Judge Richard Posner in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and later for Justice Scalia. He went on to teach at the University of Chicago before moving to Yale and then Harvard, teaching what was then a relatively obscure subject—cyberlaw—at all three law schools. In 1997 this led Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to appoint Mr Lessig as the “special master” in the antitrust case against Microsoft. He was later removed from the case after an appeals court ruled that the powers he had been granted were broader than those allowed by the rules governing special masters, and he was asked instead to file a brief as a “friend of the court”. The case established Mr Lessig as one of America's experts in technology law.

In 2000 he switched coasts and moved to Stanford Law School, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he teaches today. By this time he had become involved in the case launched by Eric Eldred, a literacy advocate known for making out-of-copyright books available free online, who was contesting the 20-year copyright extension granted in the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Mr Lessig has no beef with copyrights per se, but he objects on constitutional, educational and creative grounds to their continual extension, which makes them, in effect, perpetual.

The constitution gives Congress the power to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Having started as a renewable 14-year term in the 18th century, American copyright terms now endure for the life of the artist plus 70 years. And where copyright once concerned only an elite class of authors and publishers, the internet now makes it a daily issue for millions around the globe. For people creating videos, digitising books and mashing up online content of all kinds, “it's impossible not to bump up against copyright,” says Mr Lessig.

So in 2001 he founded Creative Commons, offering everyone an alternative to standard copyrights through various gradations of permission for use (right down to “no rights reserved”). “Before Creative Commons, there was no easy way to do all that,” says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University in England. Today more than 100m online documents sport Creative Commons licences in place of the standard copyright symbol.

But in spite of this and three copyright cases Mr Lessig has brought to court—including arguing the Eldred case before the Supreme Court—copyright terms have not been rolled back. The Supreme Court ruled that copyright extensions do not violate the spirit of the constitution, provided they are still for “limited terms”, and rejected Mr Lessig's argument that such extensions can have the effect of limiting freedom of speech.

Although some see his shift from copyright to corruption as a sudden change of heart, Mr Lessig's writings have long drawn a connection between the two. In a 2004 article about the Eldred case called “How I Lost the Big One”, Mr Lessig bemoaned that “copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again,” adding that congressmen are, indirectly, defending their “gravy train of contributions”.

Not everyone agrees with Mr Lessig's view that industry money has had an undue influence on copyright. A few wins in the legislature do not constitute “massive corruption”, says Hilary Rosen, who for years locked horns with Mr Lessig when she was head of the Recording Industry Association of America, a body that represents the music industry. “I don't buy into the premise—unless he thinks that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson started the corruption,” she says.

As he prepares to embark upon his new campaign, Mr Lessig—whose conversation frequently sounds footnoted, so often does he credit the book or person who inspired the point he is making—is already examining the model used by organisations such as MAPLight.org and the Sunlight Foundation, both of which provide databases that enable American voters to see which groups fund particular politicians, what their voting records are, which companies they own shares in, and so on. These are good examples of how technology can promote transparency. “Technology will be a crucial part of solving this problem,” he says, because it “challenges the balance of power”.

Mr Lessig goes to Washington

He is also arguing his case in speeches and on his blog, with the hopes of inspiring and encouraging others to participate in his campaign, in a manner akin to Wikipedia. If “you can architect the problem into bite-sized chunks” and then motivate volunteers, the results can be impressive, he says, noting that Wikipedia has grown to be one of the internet's ten most popular sites. “If we mobilise people to think of [corruption] as a trackable problem, we can use this technology to change Washington,” he declares. His supporters reckon that if anyone can do it, Mr Lessig can. Whether speaking to a legal, policy or technology crowd, says Mr Zittrain, “Larry can take the incomprehensible debates from academia and put them on a bumper sticker.”