Personality: Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is one of the great innovators who is making the connection between cyberspace and real life, especially stressing the necessity of a less restrictive copyright.

The Center for Internet and Society is involved in a wide variety of projects. Lessig is founder and chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons, the Software Freedom Law Center, and the Free Software Foundation. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He lobbies for less legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum and supports free software and open spectrum.

After earning a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he went to England and earned an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge and a J.D. from Yale Law School. In different interviews Lessig says that his philosophy experience at Cambridge radically changed his values and career path.
Before he became a professor at Stanford he taught at the Harvard Law School (faculty director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) and the University of Chicago Law School.

Lessig infront of US Supreme Court

So far Lessig published three books: “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” (2000), “The Future of Ideas” (2001) and “Free Culture” (2004). In a collaborative effort Lessig also started to update “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” in form of a Wiki. Once the project is completed Lessig will take the content and edit it for publication: Code v.2 was supposed to be published in late 2005 by Basic Books, but it seems that people are still working on it.

Referring to the analogy with computer memory/file permissions Lessig termed the phrase that “we used to live in a read-only culture and now live in a read/write culture”. Other quotes from Lessigs keynotes and speeches are also collected on WikiQuote , like “A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. … Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized.”

Lawrence Lessig

Creative Commons

Codebook v.2

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