The tech blogosphere is atwitter over a new paper from the Progress & Freedom Foundation criticizing Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor.
The paper, by Thomas D. Sydnor II, a senior fellow and director of PFF’s Center for the Study of Digital Property, says that Mr. Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity “‘demonize[s]’ property owners in order to convince the government to impose a form of ‘radical’ and ‘quasi-socialist’ utopianism.” It also refers to Mr. Lessig as a “name-calling demagogue.”
The paper from PFF, a market-oriented, technology and public-policy think tank, has been criticized by some high-profile tech bloggers around the country, many of whom have disagreed with Mr. Lessig in the past. Mr. Lessig remains a controversial figure for his views on intellectual property, but he retains a strong following of legal scholars, some of whom tried to get him to run for the Congressional seat of Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who died in February. —Catherine Rampell
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