I humbly suggest that this is a very big deal. For those of us who are interested in "intellectual property," Larry Lessig is something of a guru. What's so attractive about Larry is that get marshals his enormous intellect towards truly understanding the issues at hand -- not just their technical details but their deeper meaning -- and explains that understanding in ways that resonate with the rest of us. He'll dig out an example from the back of his brain and draw connections between past and present that make very difficult topics seem quite clear. He's done that for years and with great persistence on IP, copyright, control of creative content, so on and so forth.

In hindsight, his commitment towards working to free the footage of the presidential debates was a sign that he was expanding beyond intellectual property of late. And he's found over the years that, like I think many of us are finding, even when you're right making public policy progress on the issues you care about is almost impossible in a political environment that not only doesn't play fair, but is so skewed that it makes something of a joke of the idea of participatory, responsive democracy.

And so, for the next ten years at least Larry has committed himself to studying and making contributions to the field of government corruption, broadly written. He tries to explain why on his blog:

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a "corruption" of) the political process. That our government can't understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

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?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

If you feel that way, that the political process is so broken that fixing it is step one in any improvement we hope to make, then Larry Lessig is a powerful ally. This is going to be fun.