Lawrence Lessig, champion of the Creative Commons licensing concept, and opponent of patent protection and intellectual property, has announced that he is shifting his focus to studying and helping to end corruption in the American political system. After spending the last ten years battling America’s (admittedly) corporate-inspired drive for extended copyright terms, Lessig evidently discovered that the underlying problem of public policy-making is corruption (Where the hell, exactly, is the rock you’ve been living under, Lawrence?), and, oddly, he arrived at the conclusion after listening to Barack Obama, Al Gore, and an “anonymous” dirty old “Republican of prominence".

I like the Creative Commons, and I’ve often found Lessig’s blog fascinating, but my initial reaction to this particular blog post is utter shock at the apparent obtuseness of this learned scholar and suspicion that his treatment of the subject of political corruption will be biased towards Democrats whom he admires. His posts following the announcement have referenced Barack Obama and John Edwards as examples of corruption fighters. Whether or not they are, I’m not going to get into, yet. I need time to think about this and arrange my thoughts. This is just my initial reaction. But, certainly, if Lessig is going to guide his study of the subject by focusing on people he already perceives to be above corruption, he is going to learn very little and do an incredible disservice to the members of academia who will eventually read whatever he writes on the topic.

Some people on the other side of the political spectrum who are immediately coming to mind are, of course, Ron Paul, who represents the polar opposite of Obama and Edwards politically, but whom no one could claim to be more principled or less corrupt when it comes to policy-making, and Senator Tom Coburn, who actually wrote a book all about corruption in policy-making. Will Lessig pay any attention to these guys? Or will he ignore them, because they may have valid philosophical objections to his positions on patents and intellectual property? If he does, all the next ten years of his life will amount to is a demonstration of the corruption of his own thought process.

It’s not as if Lessig’s immune to unreasonable arguments:

This is a thought I’ve often had in the debates I’ve been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a “no brainer.” As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea – both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

Well, gee, Lawrence, I’m sure it’s because they’re all idiots. I mean, it’s not like they could have any reasonable objections, since everyone operates under the same philosophy and no one thinks creators of intellectual property ought to be able to choose the nature of its use in the future.

I’m all for a scholar of prominence and widespread respect undertaking a thorough study of the corrupted process of policy-making in this country. That would be an extremely useful contribution to the (remarkably small) body of knowledge on the subject and of which most common citizens are unaware. But if it’s actually just some politically biased charade of that, well, then we have problem.

Edited July 3, 2007. Removed questions regarding Lessig’s reference to Milton Friedman and term extensions. Friedman, with other economists of note, filed an amicas brief in relation to Eldred v. Ashcroft arguing the lack of economic benefit of term extension.