Before an audience, however, Lessig becomes electric. His students once asked him to tell them something about himself. Normally, Lessig is a private, even shy, person. But Lessig's most distinctive feature is a startlingly high forehead it's almost as if, in an attempt to accommodate his brain, the top of his head was pulled up a couple of inches, like an image stretched by Kai's Power Tools. His features gather toward the center of his face, a configuration accentuated by tiny, Rumpole of the Bailey wire-rim glasses that barely cover his eye sockets. At 41, his face has the soft pallor of a life spent out of the sun. He's wearing a checked Gap shirt and his trademark black jeans. Sitting in the corner of the lecture amphitheater - each seat wired with power plugs and Ethernet ports - he feverishly pecks on his Titanium laptop. Outside it is sweltering, but in Langdell Hall, where the Berkman Center of the Harvard Law School is holding a weeklong seminar, it is comfortably air-conditioned.

It is the third of July in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in a few minutes Larry Lessig is going to tell us how bad things are. That's why the law professor has declared war on Mickey Mouse. He is the chief theorist, the most respected mind, the most passionate speechifier. In the realm of Internet politics and law, no one even approaches Lessig's stature.

Lessig also founded a clinical law center at Stanford Law School, where he now teaches, and has launched Creative Commons, an ambitious project through which he hopes to establish a giant repository of works unfettered by restrictive copyright laws. The second, The Future of Ideas, is quickly becoming the bible of intellectual property monkey-wrenchers.

Lessig has since published two successful and influential books: The first, Code, is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the digital age. His friends and admirers now view the episode as one that accelerated, by dint of publicity, the most brilliant career in Internet law. And that same day, the Federal Court of Appeals had the last word: Lessig was out. Lessig would use the forum to cut through the self-interested portrayals of the facts on both sides and draw a road map for resolving the thorny questions in cyberspace's grand shootout.Īll the while, though, Microsoft had been maneuvering to get Lessig off the case. On February 3, 1998, Lessig called Microsoft and the government to a public hearing that was to be held in Boston in a few weeks, and flagged the courthouse administrator to prepare for what undoubtedly would be a huge media event.

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