LESSIG SPEAKS.

Julian Sanchez scored the first interview with Lawrence Lessig since he announced his congressional run and I think it answers a lot of the questions Mori raised yesterday. I don't think Lessig has any illusions about the difficulties of his project nor does he expect to make a difference solely through example. Rather I think he hopes to change congress through the platform a congressional seat gives him in the media and through the direct connections it would give him to lawmakers.

Lessig says he began considering the prospect after a member of the audience at one of his recent lectures asked him why he wasn't doing something about the problem of political corruption—a challenge that struck home. But he admits there's also a practical angle. "When I was doing free culture stuff, there were hundreds of fora every year where people wanted to talk about these issues. There are no industry conferences on political corruption, and I quickly realized this was going to be harder to talk about than I had expected." Finally, there's what sounds like a bit of a perfectionist streak in the equation. "It would be painful to watch other people try to solve the problems I'm talking about and do it wrong," Lessig says.

On campaign finance he has fairly standard, but nonetheless sound ideas (though "earmarks" is an overused buzzword that tends to confuse the issue):

One simple means of reducing the political power of campaign cash, Lessig says, "could be done tomorrow." He wants to ban legislative earmarks, those juicy morsels of targeted federal funding legislators direct toward pet projects and political supporters. Lessig also hopes to encourage more robust public financing of campaigns, noting the salutary effect such policies appear to be having in states like Maine and Arizona.

It's also worth noting that, for all the talk about changing congress, Lessig's first passion was the egregiously corporate-friendly state of our copyright laws and communications regulations. As he says:

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."One obstacle to such innovation is the Federal Communications Commission, which "was established in order to protect the incumbents," and may now need to be "restructured to facilitate competition." As an example, Lessig points to recent spectrum policy, which he describes as "extremely disappointing." According to Lessig, "circa 2001, the basic lesson we had learned is that we had undervalued unlicensed spectrum, that we didn't understand its innovation potential. Everyone was adopting the view that we needed more unlicensed areas alongside more spectrum auctions."

--Sam Boyd