November 5, 2014

What The New Yorker Got Wrong About Lawrence Lessig

In its October 13, 2014 article about Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC, The New Yorker writes:

In 2001, Lessig co-founded Creative Commons, an alternative copyright system that allows people to share their work more freely.

In fact, this isn’t quite right. Creative Commons is not an “alternative copyright system.” It is a licensing regime that uses the existing framework of copyright law to make it easier for copyright holders to release their works under open terms. This is an important distinction in thinking about what Lessig is trying to do with the Mayday PAC, which aims to use the loosening of restrictions on campaign donations that resulted from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to raise millions of dollars specifically in order to elect candidates dedicated to campaign finance reform. The New Yorker titled its piece, “Embrace the Irony,” and the Mayday PAC is indeed an irony. But in the context of Lessig’s earlier work on Creative Commons, it is a familiar one. Both efforts seek to use existing legal frameworks to subvert a status quo those frameworks were intended to support.

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