Official: I’m warning you. If you say “Jehovah” once more …

(He gasps at his error and claps his hand over his mouth. A stone hits him on the side of the head.)

Right! Who threw that?

Women: (high voices)

It was her.

It was *him*.

(low voices)

It was him.

Official: Was it you?

Culprit: Yes.

Official: All right.

Culprit: Well, you did say “Jehovah.”

(The women all shriek and throw stones at her from very close range.)

But doesn’t that start getting into playing a pork and patronage game?

Actually, there is a corporate constituency for free culture to some extent – e.g. Google. And the adverse inferences from that were clearly upsetting to Lessig.

I think that as a tenured professor, he’s in a pretty good position to engage in a little non-market activism.

Perhaps health care may be a very different kettle of fish than IP…where, for various reasons, perhaps there is very little natural corporate constituency for free culture.

On the other hand, consider an article like this, showing that a big telco can see the wisdom of a proposal like Terry Fisher’s book Promises to Keep:

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020530_chander.html

As Chander writes,

“Verizon’s [compulsory license] proposal demonstrates that there are corporate interests that are harmed by ever-stronger intellectual property rights. While many rightly observe that too little intellectual property protection would discourage innovation, it is equally true that too-strong intellectual property rights add friction to the working of the economy, taxing businesses, both old and new, and dampening the possibility of innovation.”

So yes, you’re not going to find any socialist corporations out there. But there are ways of getting some powerful players on one’s side in particular fights.

Compare that to the kind of reform Lessig is talking about–which I think is the type of thing that all those big players will (successfully) rally against.

But what if the goal is intrinsically anti-corporate?

That is, I understand what you’re saying, but isn’t it sort of begging the question? If the only things that can be done is what corporations want, saying try to get a corporation to want what you want, won’t ever work if you want something that’s contradictory to the corporate ethos.

Helath Care is the poster-child here – almost by definition, you can’t get a corporate coalition for good health care, because the monetary incentives are not to treat sick people.

This is all of course the old “Work within the system – or not” argument.