What IT Wants From The Next White House

LAWRENCE LESSIG Bio: Stanford professor of law, founder & CEO of the Creative Commons, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Endorsing: Barack Obama The Skinny: Lessig, a pioneering advocate for network neutrality and amending patent law to promote open-source innovation, is also a staunch supporter of Barack Obama.

WHAT HE WANTS FROM THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION:

I think there is an extraordinarily dangerous threat in the use of patents to block open-source development. Government has a role to make sure that patent law is not more expansive than is productive or necessary. Is the area that you are providing patents producing value, driving innovation? In areas like drugs, yes. In software, no. So I would strongly suggest rethinking patent laws.

There have to be strong anti-trust principles and they have to be clear. The government has to be clearer on these principles, like in the 700 MHz FCC wireless spectrum auction, there was a refusal to set an auction cap, which naturally leads towards concentration. Government needs to create a subtle balance to avoid these kinds of problems. I think we should not rely on corporations to be quasi-governments. A corporation is a tiger, its job is to make money for its shareholders in a way that's consistent with the law. The government shouldn't weaken our will in that regard. The real objective is to get government to get policy right, and for corporations to compete and make money in accord with that policy. And we should welcome their success when they do so.

There are basic issues, where [the Democratic] candidates seem similar, such as a commitment to network neutrality. But in the details, Clinton and Obama are actually different. She's not really been pushing it, but he has a very strong position, which is to block discrimination on the same use by different people. So a provider couldn't, say, charge more for Yahoo video but less for Google video, for example. There's also a big difference in the way they want to make government open or transparent. Barack's talking about more than just making the government's Web sites as nice as possible. They're never going to be as transparent as we'd like. But he's saying, 'Let's make government data accessible in ways that machines can use them.'

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