Bloo sez, "With the advent of the US election cycle, it's a great time to reference a remix featuring Lessig – a blues featuring prolific ccmixter contributor

Brian sez, "Lawrence Lessig, former EFF board member, chair of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, founder of the Center for Internet and Society, founding board member of Creative Commons, and former board member of the Free Software Foundation is taking on a new project — walking across New Hampshire. — Read the rest

Larry Lessig and friends are walking the length of New Hampshire for #NHRebellion, to reform campaign finance and try to end corruption in American politics (see Larry's excellent TED Talk about this, above). The two-week walk starts on January 11, the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death. — Read the rest

"Each year, EFF's Pioneer Awards ceremony gives the digital civil liberties community a chance to honor the work of those who have bettered our world through remarkable innovation, activism, journalism, or leadership," writes the EFF's Richard Esguerra. This year's awards honored James Love, Aaron Swartz, and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, and included a powerful keynote by professor Lawrence Lessig and from Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the partner of the late, young Mr. — Read the rest

When Larry Lessig used a clip from "Lisztomania" by the French band Phoenix in a lecture, he was pretty sure that it was fair use — after all, he's written several books on copyright and teaches at Harvard Law. But Liberation Music, who claim the license to the song, had the video of Lessig's lecture removed from YouTube several times, and threatened Lessig with a lawsuit for sending counter-claims asserting that he was in the right. — Read the rest

Lawrence Lessig writes in the Daily Beast today about the relationship between the internet and civil liberties principles, in the wake of Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance leak.

"We don't know yet whether Snowden is telling the truth," says Lessig. Not that he doubts Snowden, or doesn't, it's just that we literally can't know how much of it is true, because it's all secret. — Read the rest

Writing in The Atlantic, Larry Lessig reminds supporters of the Democratic Party that corruption isn't limited to the Republicans. The Dems, too, have a party where policy is driven by campaign donations rather than principle, evidence or even ideology.

This way of thinking about the "necessities" of modern political life is so obvious to mainstream Democrats that it follows the party whether it is in power or not.

Larry Lessig presented at TED his new project, an effort to curb the corrupting influence of money in American politics with a reform to campaign finance.

On Naked Capitalism, The Unknown Transcriber has transcribed the full text of Lawrence Lessig's Aaron's Law talk, which was one of Larry's finest moments.

So Aaron was a hacker. But he was not just a hacker. He was an Internet activist, but not just an Internet activist.

Larry Lessig's Harvard Law address, "Aaron's Laws - Law and Justice in a Digital Age" is a riveting, bittersweet talk on the state of Internet law, and law in general, and, always, corruption.

Today:

Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age

Lawrence Lessig:
Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School
February 19, 2013 @ 05:00 PM

Harvard Law School will host a public lecture, "Aaron's Laws," by Lawrence Lessig on the occasion of his appointment as the Roy L.

Larry Lessig will give a lecture on the law and Aaron Swartz. Details to come.

Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002). Photo: Rich Gibson CC BY

"My three year old, Tess, putting her arms around my neck, holding me as tight as she possibly could, promising me 'the doctors will put him back together, papa, they will." — Read the rest

Larry Lessig's remembrance of Aaron Swartz, the young activist who took his life last night, is beautiful and angry, and expresses an important insight into the vindictive, disgusting behavior of the Department of Justice (and the complicity of MIT) in hounding Aaron:

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate.

Nisha from the Open Rights Group sez,

Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Wendy Seltzer will be leading this year's Open Rights Group conference (aka ORGCon) in London on 24th March 2012.
From the government snooping on your data to default internet blocking and monitoring to the corporate capture of state and democratic institutions – we'll be covering vast regions of the digital rights sphere.

Lawrence Lessig's new ebook One Way Forward is one of the most exciting documents I've read since I first found The Federalist Papers. One Way Forward is more of a long pamphlet than a book. It's tempting to call it a "manifesto," except that it's so darned reasonable, and that's not a word that comes readily to mind when one hears "manifesto." — Read the rest

Kevin Kelly provided a nice summary of Larry Lessig's recent SALT ( Seminar About Long-Term Thinking) talk. It was about corruption in the US congress.

Lessig said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions.

[Video Link]

Here's Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig in Boston NYC: "If this movement can be identified as a fight against the corruption that our political system has become, then it has the potential to bridge left and right in a way that could become much more generative, much more important, because people on the left and people on the right look at the crony capitalism of this system and they look at the way in which money from Wall Street bought the regulatory infrastructure that led to the collapse of 2008. — Read the rest

Here's a great mashup of a Larry Lessig riff on Thoreau and political transparency, mixed with a slow, soulful blues, to excellent effect. "Walden Pond Blues" was mixed by Admiral Bob, who performs the music under a CC-BY license.

Walden Pond Blues

MP3 Link

(Thanks, Blooflame! — Read the rest

Davidjoho sez, "Dan Jones at the Berkman Center has produced the perfectly appropriate birthday video for Larry Lessig's 50th." It's a collection of Larry's, family, colleagues and friends lipsynching to Talking Heads' magnificent anthem "Once in a Lifetime."

Happy birthday, Larry! — Read the rest