The free culture leader has announced he is moving on to a new brier patch. Lawrence Lessig is giving up the copyright fight and moving on to politics. From Taking the Copyright Fight Into a New Arena, NY Times:

Mr. Lessig addressed in his blog his frustration with a political system that he sees as unshakably in support of longer copyright terms so obviously against the public interest.

“Why? The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process,” he wrote, explaining that he does not define corruption in the simplest terms of bribery but that “in the U.S., listening to money is the only way to secure re-election.”

Mr. Lessig’s move up the food chain — or down the rabbit hole, as one poster on his blog put it — from legal reasoning to the political system is a reasonable step, according to some people who know him well.