A Danish show called "Deadline" hosted an interview with Lawrence Lessig to discuss his new focus on government corruption. Lessig spent the last 10 years working to make copyright law more flexible and founding the Creative Commons. He's now turning his attention to political corruption, which he believes undermined his copyright efforts and subverts progress on monstrous issues where the U.S. lags behind, such as global warming and childhood nutrition. It's a good interview, and he gets to the heart of the problems. When challenged about whether we as a society can actually pull this off he notes that it will be a long project, but says: "Even if I were absolutely convinced we're going to fail, that's no reason not to fight". Optimistically, Lessig points out that a positive first step towards progress is transparency in campaign finance, which is already well under way (he mentions the work of the Sunlight Foundation). Lessig also notes that the internet is only now starting to edge towards its democratic potential and that we are only now beginning to use peer production to solve these sorts of unwieldy problems.
Solving Political Corruption with Peer Production & Transparency
