If you haven’t heard of Lawrence Lessig, here’s a good chance to get acquainted in an interview with Charlie Rose this week. Lessig is best known for his work with the implications and promises of digital media and in fighting to keep copyright laws from going beyond their original intent — to encourage innovation — to a new desire –to protect the wealth for the heirs and corporate holders of extended copyrights–, which would, ipso facto, discourage innovation.

He talks with Rose about the transformative possibilities of Obama, who he met at the University of Chicago and supported very early in Obama’s career:

“People don’t understand just how extraordinary he is. There’s an image of Obama being extraordinary but they do not know really how extraordinary he is. … He is an extraordinarily careful, deep, thinker, and reflective and balanced. … He has a vision about how government can be changed to actually do something helpful, be transformed…”

He sees the US as a cancer patient who, on the way to the hospital, is involved in a horrific auto accident. As a result the trauma team has to stabilize the patient so the cancer can be dealt with. Obama needs a crisis team but at the same time to understand the trauma team must give way to those who will deal with the longer term, and terminal crisis.

The mid part of the interview Lessig talks about his “free culture” ideas, the hybrid economy and the need for new legal understandings of cultural ownership.

The final third [22:00] he talks about his new focus on “the disproportionate influence money has on the congressional debates.” The key, to his mind is, that there is a disproportionate influence of money all all realms of society, on lawyers, bankers, car-makers — not just congress. Scientists, for example, are doing research because of the money offered, not because of the intrinsic importance of the question. Rose segues him into talking about an early case Lessig took on, suing the Catholic Church for turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of a young boy, abuse which Lessig himself had suffered. Key to Lessig’s conception is that while the abuser is of course evil, many others join him in that evil — simply by not picking up the phone, by not wanting to get involved. So, the money corruption in congress is a corruption many of us share in, in our own professions, and by not calling our representatives on it.

[38 min]

You can see some of his famous “keynotes” at http://www.lessig.blip.tv