Lawrence Lessig is the quintessential American academic superstar. He's the author of three acclaimed books on cyber law, and has held chairs at Chicago, Harvard and Stanford Universities. He was poised to play a pivotal role in probably the most important US court battle in the hi-tech arena in recent years - the anti-trust case against Microsoft, until being thrown off the case at its insistence, in part because of his radical legal ideas.
Europe played a key role in shaping the man. It was during three years' philosophy study at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-80s that the young graduate from Pennsylvania University found his "rightwing lunatic Republican" ideas challenged and replaced with a more nuanced libertarianism. And it was from wandering around eastern Europe as the Soviet empire faltered that he gained insights into the nature of constitutionalism, his chosen field.
But it was the law of cyberspace where Lessig made his name. What sent him down this path was a 1993 Village Voice feature by Julian Dibbell about a virtual rape in cyberspace. Dibbell had written that even though the text-based virtual world and sexual violence were merely words, those words had caused significant harm.
Lessig recalls thinking it was amazing that the Village Voice didn't realise it was parroting Catharine MacKinnon - the radical feminist lawyer whose views on pornography were generally antithetical to those of the Voice. "As a teacher, this was perfect for me," says Lessig. "If I could raise questions in the context of cyberspace, where people don't know what their political leanings should be, then I can get them to think about them."
Meaningless laws
In the course of teaching students the law of this new world, he says, "I had a recognition that linked what I was doing in cyberspace to what I had been doing in studying constitutionalism in eastern Europe. They had legislatures and courts ... but what it meant to be a court was different, and that was the social understanding. In the context of cyberspace, you could have whatever laws you liked, but unless the architecture supports or enables them then they're meaningless."
This insight - that computer code (the "architecture") can function as a kind of law in the online world - lies at the heart of Lessig's first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. As he soon realised, "the most interesting context for that was intellectual property", because there were examples of code trumping law - notably digital rights management.
There was another reason why Lessig focused on this area. "It wasn't a fair fight: all the great lawyers were on the side of IP maximalism [the view that intellectual property (IP) should be protected forever] because they were all hired by Hollywood. So I kind of felt like a lawyer with a guilty conscience, and just got into it to try to see if there was a way to balance it."
There was also a specific problem: the extension by Congress in 1998 of the term of copyright from "life of the author plus 50 years" to "life plus 70 years" (as in the UK). The practical result is that nothing new will enter the public domain in the US until 2019, and that art, which is built on the work of others, will be deprived of millions of sources of inspiration.
In 2002, Lessig succeeded in getting the US supreme court to consider the issue. His case drew on the US constitution, which said copyright was for "limited times" and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". He argued that by continually extending copyright - 11 times in the past 40 years - Congress had effectively made it unlimited; furthermore, the retrospective extension was not "promoting" progress, since many of the authors it applied to were dead.
To Lessig's chagrin, the court was not persuaded. But he drew an important lesson. "The key insight I felt I got was that you were never going to win this until you got recognition in the public." His book Free Culture was an attempt to explain to people what was at stake. Its message is summed up in the subtitle: "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity."
Lessig has made the book freely available online (http://free-culture.org/freecontent/), using a licence drawn up by his Creative Commons project, set up in 2001 as another response to the extension of copyright. Through these licences, which hand back to users some rights granted by copyright to creators - such as those to make copies or derivative works - Lessig hopes to provide a legal framework in which free culture can bloom.
The analogy with Richard Stallman's GNU General Public Licence is evident: "I think of the free culture movement as inspired by the free software movement," Lessig says. "I think it's going to be a more significant movement than the free software movement because whatever the importance of the freedom of coders, coders will still be just a tiny proportion of the public, but culture is ... much broader."
Copyright trigger
Lessig would like to see copyright reduced to 14 years, renewable to 28, as laid down by the 1710 Statute of Anne, the basis of all subsequent legislation in the UK and many countries. He also wants the emphasis on copying as the trigger for copyright to be removed. "In a digital age, copying is as natural as breathing" - every web page you view is technically a copy - "and the idea that the law should be invoked every time there's a trigger of copying is totally inefficient." He suggests a different approach: "[If] you're distributing something publicly for commercial purposes then that's the appropriate thing to be taxing with the copyright act."
More realistically, Lessig is trying to limit the damage that copyright extensions cause to culture by requiring people to register for them, rather than receiving them automatically. "The vast majority would never request the extension, and so most stuff would pass into the public domain and the cost of perpetually extending copyrights would disappear."
So what drives this superstar lawyer with a guilty conscience to maintain such a punishing pace? "I really do at the core believe in the law," he explains. "I believe in this space where it is reason that is supposed to be directing power, as opposed to just power directing power."
· Curriculum vitae
Age: 45
Education
1980-1983 University of Pennsylvania, BA economics, BS management; 1983-1986 Trinity College, Cambridge, MA philosophy; 1986-1987 University of Chicago, law; 1987- 1989 University of Yale, juris doctor
Career
1989-1990 Clerk to Judge Richard Posner, US court of appeals; 1990-1991 Clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, US supreme court; 1991-1997 Assistant professor, then professor of law, Chicago University; 1997-2000 Professor of law, Harvard University; 2000- Professor of law, Stanford University; 2001- Chairman, Creative Commons
Family: Married to the human-rights lawyer Bettina Neuefeind, who investigated Kosovo war crimes. They have one son, Willem.
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