Blog: Larry Lessig

It may be pure fantasy, but with the unfortunate passing of Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat from mostly San Mateo County (northern Silicon Valley), some folks are suggesting the perfect next Congressman would be Professor Larry Lessig. There's a Draft Lessig Web site and a Facebook group that's up to 1,558 members. Nancy Scola has a good article on TechPresident about why this is not entirely (though almost) farfetched.

Earlier this month, Barack Obama released his plan for technology policy at a speech at Google. Larry Lessig immediately endorsed it, and Public Knowledge had lots of praise. Lessig, PK founder Gigi Sohn, and many Silicon Valley executives have been advising Obama, and their positive influence is clear on the plan.

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The field of computer science, at base, is about efficiency. Algorithms are evaluated based on the time they take to run - "big O notation", using formulas like O(n²) or O(n log n) telling how much time it takes to accomplish a task based on the size of the input. Programmers love to optimize systems, to make them run faster and better and more reliably. And one of the great joys of computer engineering, unlike, say, architecture or bridge building, is that if something doesn't work optimally, it's often not that expensive to simply rewrite it.

It's easy to think government ought to work the same way. After all, government is simply a social construct, governed by a set of rules (laws) just as a computer program governs a machine's behavior. (Larry Lessig famously wrote how "code is law".) If some aspect of government isn't working, why can't we just reprogram it?

Unfortunately, government is not just a socially programmed system executing a set of legal instructions, but it's a complex one with lots of dependencies. In software, you might choose to simply rewrite your code, but you may be running it on an operating system you didn't write, with an application server you didn't write, accessing a database you didn't write. (If they're open source, you can try to submit patches, but they won't always be accepted). Or maybe your client needs you to integrate your code with some legacy system written decades ago on an IBM mainframe in FORTRAN.

When dealing with a system we can't fix, we try sending it data and seeing what it will do. If I call this function, this happens. If I put that data there, that happens. Software engineers start acting like biochemists - if the cell's concentration of ions is such-and-such, then the cell will exhibit so-and-so behavior. You can complain about the cell or curse the people who wrote the FORTRAN code, but you can't reason with these systems and explain to them why they're wrong.

To get results, we must treat government similarly. Think of Congress as a black box that reacts to various stimuli. Send them ten thousand letters from citizens in their districts about an issue, and they'll pay attention. Get a lot of people to give money to their challenger, and they'll think long and hard before voting against your point of view. Make it clear that voters care about an issue, and they'll care, too.

People on Capitol Hill like to think they're impartial stewards of the country, thinking dispassionately about the Right Thing to Do. But usually there's no consensus on what that right thing is. And when people in Congress do the wrong thing, it's easy to get frustrated about their backward thinking. Ed Felten, a terrific advocate for engineers, wrote a clever post rightly excoriating Rep. Howard Berman for saying he'd consulted "all the interested parties" on patent reform legislation when in truth he'd only consulted all of the Beltway lobbying groups, not citizens. Many commenters chimed in that politicians only listen to the groups that give them money and "know which master they are serving."

Back when Berman was appointed chair of the House IP Subcommittee, Larry Lessig wrote a scathing critique of the Democrats, newly in the majority. "'Radical' changes in Washington always have this Charlie Brown/Lucy-like character (remember Lucy holding the football?): it doesn't take long before you realize how little really ever changes in DC. Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell." Lessig saw Berman's appointment as a rejection of the blogs and activist groups on the Net that regained them the majority.

Felten is right that Berman wasn't considering the public interest. Lessig was right that the leadership wasn't considering Net activists' concerns when appointing him in the first place. But simply saying that on a blog is like saying that a cancerous cell shouldn't be dividing so darn much. True, but we don't just talk about it, we develop chemotherapy and radiation and drugs to stop it. Instead of just blogging or whining on comments, we need to be developing antibodies to the special interest groups. The ordinary citizens, who Congress isn't listening to, need to make themselves heard, by writing letters, making phone calls, signing petitions, giving money, and voting.

We know it works. Just look at Net Neutrality, an issue that most people still don't understand. But a coalition of groups from Free Press to MoveOn to the Christian Coalition worked together and didn't just talk, they bombarded Congress with advocacy. And it got results. Several major Presidential candidates and the Congressional leadership came out in support of Net Neutrality. The stimulus was strong enough, and the response meaningful. That fight is far from over, but it shows what citizens can do when they take action.

Next time you read about the latest assault on Internet freedom, don't just blog about it. To Lessig, Felten, Cory Doctorow, and all the other great bloggers, don't just write about how much it sucks, direct people to get involved to fix it. Encourage them to join or give to groups like Save the Internet, Free Press, Public Knowledge, EFF, or the political action commitee I founded, IPac, as well as many more.

For a long time everyone complained bitterly about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior and its operating system dominance. Then some hackers got together, enlisted more hackers, and created an alternative so good that most Web sites don't run on Microsoft software and (coupled with several more innovations) some people say "Microsoft is dead." We can make the IP extremists' and the information gatekeepers' positions dead in Washington, too.

Larry Lessig is speaking at the PDF conference this morning, talking about his campaign to open up the content from the upcoming political debates. He showed a variety of innovative remixes of political content - Jon Stewart conducting a debate between President George W. Bush and 2000 Presidential candidate, Texas Governor Gerge W. Bush, a Paul Wolfowitz parody of "The Office", a love song between Bush and Blair, and the Obama 1984 video.

These remixes of political culture are a tremedous step forward in the ability of citizens to participate in political speech, but they require the ability for creators to use clips of public figures from the commercial media. And while Comedy Central has plenty of lawyers to defend Jon Stewart's right to do this, others don't. NBC attempted to block Robert Greenwald from using a clip of Bush, and the reason they gave? "It's not very flattering to the President." While they backed off this particular terrible excuse, media organizations continue to assert an absolute right to control all content.

Barack Obama and John Edwards have answered the call to open up debate content. Obama wrote, "The Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election. . . . We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation. . . . Rhere is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection [of copyright]. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates."

Obama's words are terrific not only for their sentiment but also for their choice of themes - he mentions incentives, the fundamental goal of copyright. Where copyright creates incentives to create, it is performing a public good. Where, as in the case of debates, it instead blocks creativity and innovation, it is a harm and has no place in that particular context.

Senator Chris Dodd has also called for opening up the debate content to citizens, as has retired Republican Congressman Robert Livingston. Hillary Clinton has not spoken up on this issue, nor have the major Republican candidates.

I'm starting a candidate scorecard on issues of innovation. Here's the scorecard so far (For space, I'm only mentioning candidates where we know their positions, or who are in the top tier of national polls):

Candidate	Free Debates
Democrats
Obama	A+
Edwards	A
Dodd	A
Clinton	???
Republicans
Giuliani	???
McCain	???
Romney	???

"Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first." Thus begins a Wired column about California's ReadyReturns, a program that mailed already-filled-out returns to taxpayers whose only income was likely to be wages, which the state already knows - and a program opposed by H&R Block and Intuit because it would diminish the need for taxpayers to shell out extra money for tax preparation services.

This is reminiscent of the arguments copyright cartels use to justify extending copyright terms. In a choice between giving one small group a chance to make money against the interests of the public in general, sadly the public interest loses far too often because of the distorting effect of money in politics and the way entrenched, narrow interests are more likely to spend money to advance those interests.

As I was reading the article and musing upon the similarity of the two arguments, I reached the bottom and saw the byline - Lawrence Lessig. Aha!