NEW YORK--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.
On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig co-founded the project Change Congress.
(Credit: Lawrence Lessig )"Bribery wasn't even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind of corruption," Lessig explained. "Up to 25 percent of the voters literally sold their votes. I'm not talking about a golden past."
But there are two big differences between that vintage sleaze and the corruption in government today, Lessig insisted. The first is that because of the government's reach and its potential to affect everyday American life, keeping it clean is a more serious priority.
"Even though today the individuals are better than the individuals who populated our government in the past, the problem of this corruption is much worse," Lessig explained. "And it's much worse because government today is much more significant. It's first more critical to core national problems...and second, it's more pervasive. The government's fingers are everywhere."
He brought up a number of examples: Perks from the sugar industry caused the Food Nutrition Board to establish guidelines that determined a "balanced diet" to be 25 percent sugar. When he was vice president of the U.S., Al Gore couldn't have his way with Internet deregulation because Congress was concerned that money from the telecommunications industry would stop flowing, said Lessig, who considered a run for Congress himself. And then there's the big one: global warming, and the "junk science" research put forth at the behest of the oil industry.
"Just putting money on the table removes the conditions of trust," Lessig said. "Money destroys the opportunity for trust. Eighty-eight percent of the people in my district believe they have their votes bought."
But the other big difference between the 19th century's politics and today's is what's making possible Lessig's mission at Change Congress: Daniel Webster's America didn't have Wikipedia, WordPress, or Twitter. (It would've been kind of cool, though: "Wig shopping with @henryclay, then out to eat. WTF is with these tea prices?") The Web's tools have made it possible for far more information to make it into the hands of ordinary citizens, and those citizens in turn can use the Web to band together and work toward democratic action.
Change Congress, which he founded with Joe Trippi, the Web czar for Howard Dean's ultimately unsuccessful but sea-changing presidential campaign, is "a kind of Google mash-up in the context of politics." Pulling together and organizing grassroots anti-corruption and activism efforts from across the Web, the ambitious effort is a "bipartisan reform movement to leverage the reform work of others."
But what's really holding us back, Lessig said, is the notion that we only have to get excited about politics every four years. The political blog phenomenon, for all the press it's gotten, is still a hotbed for small cliques of policy junkies three-fourths of the time. Change Congress, Lessig explained, will be a round-the-clock operation that doesn't only pick up when people are headed to the polls.
He left his role as founder and CEO of copyright reform advocacy group Creative Commons in April to focus on Change Congress.
"Every fourth year we wake up. There's this explosion of democratic energy and then we fall back asleep," he said. "We have this radical exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash. This is our Thursday night out."
Creative Commons, the nonprofit dedicated to reforming copyright in the digital age, said Tuesday it has received a $4 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The money will bolster Creative Commons' five-year financial plan, which has also seen support or pledges of support from Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Omidyar Network.
Out of the $4 million from the Hewlett Foundation, $2.5 million will go to the main Creative Commons organization over the next five years, and the remaining $1.5 million will go to its CCLearn education project.
Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig, the organization's founder, a Stanford law professor, and a "free culture" advocate, is stepping down from his role as CEO of Creative Commons.
His replacement will be entrepreneur Joi Ito, who described himself to CNET News.com in 2006 as "sort of part-time entrepreneur, VC and nonprofit board member...(with) some writing, blogging, speaking and government policy work on the side."
Ito has been serving as chair of the Creative Commons board and will be replaced in that role by James Boyle, a current board member and a Duke law professor.
The organization has announced two other management changes. Diane Peters will join Creative Commons as general counsel, coming from a stint at the Mozilla Foundation; the organization's current general counsel, Virginia Rutledge, will take on the new role of vice president and special counsel.
Lessig, who will remain on Creative Commons' board, made headlines earlier this year when he briefly considered a run for Congress. Though that effort was short-lived, Lessig soon thereafter launched an online-and-offline campaign called Change Congress. The new initiative's goal is to cast off the corporate influence on American politics, including lobbyists to big-money political action committees.
With his departure from Creative Commons, Change Congress will become Lessig's primary project. "Although I have changed my focus, I'm still very much committed to Creative Commons and the Free Culture cause," he said in a statement. "The work I intend to do with Change Congress is in many ways complementary to the work of Creative Commons. Both projects are about putting people in power and enabling them to build a better system."
Lessig founded Creative Commons in 2001 to combat what he saw as a rigid and outdated copyright system, encouraging the rejection of the traditional "all rights reserved" standard in favor of a "some rights reserved" alternative that would promote "creative reuse."
While big tech players like Yahoo's Flickr and the OpenSocial Foundation are eager supporters, Creative Commons still has yet to gain true mainstream media acceptance.
(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)
NEW YORK--When it comes to a strategy for galvanizing young voters in the hours before the "Super Tuesday" primaries, a coalition of big-media outlets chose to throw an online and offline dialogue with candidates. A group of tech-friendly 20-somethings in New York decided the best way to organize young supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama would be to invite them to a massive dance party.
Over the past week, invitations created through Facebook and Evite flew around the inboxes of many plugged-in young New Yorkers: an appropriate donation to Obama for America would give them access to an open bar, dance-worthy DJ music, and plenty of other young Obama fans who were willing to spend Saturday night at a fundraiser rather than a Lower East Side hotspot. The informal Web invites appear to have been a success, as several hundred people showed up--and most of the attendees, who were overwhelmingly under the age of 30 (and almost exclusively under 35) were indeed dressed up for a Saturday night out. Campaign T-shirts were almost nowhere to be found, except on one young woman sporting a shirt that said "I've Got A Crush On Obama" with plenty of pink hearts.
But the event wasn't just a bunch of kids; the "Big Obama Party" had close ties to the local technology and digital-media communities. The organizers had no formal affiliation, but several count progressive Web policy initiatives like Free Culture and Creative Commons, as well as New York University's art-meets-tech Interactive Telecommunications Program among the points on their resumes.
And the venue was Web video studio For Your Imagination, which has become a local favorite among the dotcom set due to the company's courageous willingness to host late-night parties in its office space.
The crowd wasn't quite as "dotcommy" as an event for, say, geek candidate-of-choice Ron Paul might be. It was, however, a clearly creative and tech-savvy set. There were more than a few bloggers in the house, including at least one from TechCrunch's payroll. Others were into the more experimental, Improv Everywhere-esque side of culture: one young choreographer told me that he was working on a "Boogie for Obama" in which dancers in Obama T-shirts would get their freak on in the New York subways on the day before Super Tuesday.
Throwing a Saturday night dance party for young voters as a political fundraiser, especially in a city where there are gossip-hungry bloggers on every corner (ahem), always runs the risk of turning into bad press. But there was only one moment when the event nearly erupted into scandal--when somebody decided to take Obama's "fired up and ready to go" slogan a little too literally and, well, fired up a joint. Regardless of what you think about marijuana legalization, it's still illegal in the state of New York and caused some concern among For Your Imagination representatives, whose landlords are undoubtedly being very generous by permitting them to hold open-bar parties. The offending joint was extinguished, but the dance floor energy wasn't.
Yes, that's right: people actually danced. Whether they'll actually vote--we'll see on Tuesday.
The nonpartisan alliance that formed this spring to advocate the open use of presidential-debate footage isn't very happy about Fox News' cease-and-desist letter to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign over a McCain ad that used footage from a Fox-sponsored debate.
On Thursday, the nameless group announced that it has called on Fox to rescind the letter, as well as related missives to other Republican presidential candidates.
The McCain camp, meanwhile, has continued to air the ads, claiming that using 19 seconds of a 90-minute debate constitutes fair use.
"John McCain deserves praise for taking on Fox and opposing corporations (that) want to be gatekeepers of political speech," MoveOn.org representative Adam Green said in a statement that had been issued by the online leftist hub on behalf of the group.
The left-right alliance is helmed by Stanford law professor and copyright reform advocate Larry Lessig, and it counts a host of new-media luminaries among its ranks: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Craigslist's Craig Newmark, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, MoveOn founder Eli Pariser, and Redstate co-founders Mike Krempasky and Erick Erickson. In April, shortly after forming, the group issued letters to the Democratic and Republican national headquarters, "calling for presidentia- debate video to be liberated--so that footage could be freely excerpted, shared, blogged, and YouTubed," according to a statement.
Eventually, CNN, ABC, and NBC/MSNBC responded to the initiative, announcing varying degrees of "openness" for debate footage. Fox News and other Fox broadcasting stations have not participated, and some right-leaning members of the open-debate alliance have indicated that they may encourage Republicans to follow the Democrats' lead in shunning the News Corp. division.
"Already, Fox is viewed as a partisan network by the Democrats, who will not use that forum for debates," said Redstate's Erickson. "It would be a shame if the Republicans now shut out Fox altogether from the debate process. Every other news organization has liberated their debate footage, and Fox should either be no different or no longer have the privilege of airing debates."
Fox has not yet responded to the organization's criticism.
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