VentureBeat

Lawerence Lessig, the legal expert for the digerati, is in a good mood today. One of his missions is to change Congress. With the election of Barack Obama and the wholesale shift in power in Congress, some of his job is done. But Lessig still wants the corruption of politics to change.

The founders of our country actually failed to prevent corruption from infusing itself into politics, Lessig said in a talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today. He points to the guilty verdict against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. The problem, he said, “is the extraordinary amount of money needed to keep tenure” in Congress.

To get back into Congress, members often have to spend 30 percent to 70 percent of their time raising money, he said.

“This second job increasingly becomes their first job as they yield to this influence game,” he said.

Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig also started Creative Commons, a new way to share intellectual property, and an ex board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Can Obama restore hope in the system? Lessig said that a more fundamental change is necessary to do so. He asked everyone to join his Change Congress organization.

Image courtesy of JD Lasica.

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