Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 US presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Lessig in 2017
Lawrence Lessig
Lessig speaking with Harvard internet law professor Jonathan Zittrain
Lessig with fellow Creative Commons board member Joi Ito
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
Lawrence Lessig (January 2008)
Creative Commons Japan Seminar, Tokyo (2007)
A sign in a pub in Granada notifies customers that the music they are listening to is freely distributable under a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons guiding the contributors. This image is a derivative work of Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix.