Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons Chair

Lawrence Lessig loves ideas, and he wants to set them free.

A Stanford law professor, his most notable specialty is intellectual property: he chairs the Creative Commons project, and won the 2002 Freedom Award from the Free Software Foundation. He represented Eric Eldred, a Web site operator, in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. If you want to report specifically on the Creative Commons and less on Lawrence Lessig, go here.

Lessig values the marketplace of ideas so highly that he established an “Anti-Lessig” wiki Web page where anyone can critique his work.

In 2002 a Wired Magazine correspondent, Steven Levy, wrote the definitive profile of Lawrence Lessig, tracing his path from the University of Pennsylvania to Cambridge to Yale Law School, his clerkships with Judge Richard Posner and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and his philosophical journey:

“Once a ‘right-wing lunatic,’” he wrote, “he's become a fire-breathing defender of Net values…” declaring a war on Mickey Mouse in the process!

A resume posted here gets us up to date on Lessig’s work.

Lawrence Lessig’s books include Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity (2004); The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2001); and Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999).

His blog is here.