Lessig considers running for Congress

Lawrence Lessig, the cyberlaw author and advocate for free software and online civil liberties, is considering a run for the U.S. Congress, he announced on his blog Wednesday.
Lessig, author of books such as "Free Culture" and "Code 2.0," would run for the open House of Representatives seat in California created by the death of Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat, earlier this month. A "draft Lessig" movement has popped up online since Lantos died.

Lessig said he plans to make the decision about whether to run by about March 1. "This is a very difficult decision," he wrote on his blog. "Thank you to everyone who has tried to help -- both through very strong words of encouragement and very, very strong words to dissuade."

Lessig, a self-described progressive, would run as part of his Change Congress campaign. The Stanford University law professor announced in January that he would shift his focus to political corruption and away from free software and free culture.

He called on lawmakers to stop accepting money from political action committees and lobbyists, and to stop adding so-called earmarks for special projects in appropriation legislation. Politicians need to change "how Washington works" and to end a culture of corruption that's based on political contributions, he said in a video at Lessig08.org.

"You know about this corruption in Washington, a corruption that doesn't come from evil people, a corruption that comes from good people working in a bad system," he said in the video. Progressives should work to change the way money influences decisions in Washington, he said, "not because this is, in some sense, the most important problem, but because it is the first problem that has to be solved if we're going to address these more fundamental problems later."

During a Lessig speech at Stanford in January, one audience member challenged him to "do something" about the problems in Washington, he said. Lessig is considering a run for Congress "with lots of fear and uncertainty," he said.

Already in the race for Lantos' seat is Jackie Speier, a former Democratic state senator in California. A primary election in the heavily Democratic Silicon Valley district is scheduled for April 8.

Some visitors to Lessig's blog expressed support for his candidacy, but one said Speier would be a strong candidate as well. "I think that your anti-corruption movement, and your effort to reform Congress, would be more likely to succeed from the outside, and could be damaged by a partisan campaign in which you oppose a good candidate," someone wrote.

Others repeated calls for him to run. "My only hope for the future of the Internet and our digital life in general is that we start electing candidates from this new generation, who think differently about issues like digital freedom and copyright," one person wrote. "Lessig certainly is one of those candidates."

Lessig served as a special master in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft. He's the founder of the Creative Commons, which attempts to give copyright holders additional options for licensing their work beyond all rights reserved.

Lessig has served on the boards of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.