I, Ken Takusagawa, am running a write-in
campaign to become U.S. Senator from Massachusetts in the
special election on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 (for the
Senate seat formerly occupied by Ted Kennedy).
You will need my name and address,
274 Cambridge St. #3, Boston, MA
to specify me as a write-in
candidate on the ballot.
I am running on a single-issue
platform: Free Culture, as articulated in
Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture: How Big Media
Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and
Control Creativity.
Why am I running for
Senate?
Human creativity is the fundamental force that drives the
progress of civilization.
It is ultimately the only way "good" may
be created in hopes of curing any of the evils of
the world.
I am am running for Senate because seeing how copyright
today is being used to stifle creativity deeply saddens
me.
I feel I should try to make a difference.
Even if I do not win this election, I hope to inject this
issue into the public debate.
In addition to Free Culture, I have also been
inspired by two recent court cases that occurred after the
book was published: MGM v. Grokster (2005), which
found that software companies may be held liable for their
users' illegal actions (by day, I am a professional
software developer, though not of file-sharing software),
and RIAA v. Tenenbaum (2009), which found Boston
University student Joel Tenenbaum liable for an
outrageous $675,000 for file-sharing 30 songs.
Something is wrong with the state of copyright law and
the Big Media content owners' influence over Congress.
What is Free Culture?
Free Culture is a book written by Lawrence
Lessig, then a professor at Stanford Law School (now at
Harvard Law School) about how in today's era of new
technologies, antiquated intellectual property laws,
particularly copyright, are stifling innovation and
creativity.
Read the book online
at free-culture.cc,
or
watch Lessig's
slideshow presentation.
Here is
a Wikipedia
summary:
Professor Lessig analyzes the tension that exists
between the concepts of piracy and property in the
intellectual property realm in the context of what he
calls the present "depressingly compromised process of
making law" that has been captured in most nations by
multinational corporations that are interested in the
accumulation of capital and not the free exchange of
ideas.
The book also chronicles his prosecution of
the Eldred v. Ashcroft case and his attempt to
develop the Eldred Act also known as the Public Domain
Enhancement Act or the Copyright Deregulation Act.
Lessig concludes his book by suggesting that as society
evolves into an information society there is a choice to
be made to decide if that society is to be free or
feudal in nature.
In his afterword he suggests that free software pioneer
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation model
of making content available is not against the
capitalist approach that has allowed such corporate
models as Westlaw and LexisNexis to have subscribers to
pay for materials that are essentially in the public
domain but with underlying licenses like those created
by his organization Creative Commons.
He also argues for the creation of shorter renewable
periods of copyright and a limitation on derivative
rights, such as limiting a publisher's ability to stop
the publication of copies of an author's book on the
internet for non-commercial purposes or the creation of a
compulsory licensing scheme to ensure that creators
obtain direct royalties for their works based upon their
usage statistics and some kind of taxation scheme such
as suggested by professor William Fisher of Harvard Law
School that is similar to a longstanding proposal of
Richard Stallman.
What do the opponents of Free
Culture say? What is the other side of the
issue?
As quoted in Free Culture, Jack Valenti, late
president of the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA): "Creative property owners must be accorded the
same rights and protection resident in all other property
owners in the nation."
If you agree with Valenti, and reject Lessig's subsequent
arguments
in chapter
10 against Valenti's statement, don't vote for me.
What solutions am I proposing to
fix copyright?
If elected, I will consult with experts in order to craft
legislation to fix the copyright system and promote Free
Culture.
As a starting point, Lessig proposes solutions in
the Afterword
of his book.
Who am I?
Please vote for me not as an individual, but as a representative for the
idea of Free Culture.
Unfortunately, ideas cannot run for Senate on their own.
I am a resident of Massachusetts since 2000 and was born
in New York state in 1978.
I meet the constitutional requirements for Senator.
I will not do media interviews.
I am not the eloquent one.
I am not politically "savvy".
This campaign is possible only because someone else has
clearly written down what I believe in (and Lessig himself
is, as of 2008, unwilling to run for Congress).
If you are media and wish to interview someone about Free
Culture, I suggest you interview Lawrence Lessig at
Harvard Law School, or others in the movement more
eloquent than I.
If you wish to speak to someone about the issues
surrounding RIAA v. Tenenbaum, I suggest you
interview Tenenbaum's defense team led by Charles Nesson
at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of Harvard
Law School.
I will review the comments posted to this blog, and post
updates.
Please do not try to contact me privately: in the interests
of transparency in politics, all communication should be
public.
What kind of help am I
seeking?
I plan for this campaign to be entirely
word-of-mouth.
If you wish to help, just spread the word that I am
running.
If you are spreading the word in an interesting way, e.g.,
a social networking site, let me know in the comments, and
I may link to it.
If you wish to suggest improvements to this campaign
statement, feel free to do so in the comments.
What political party am
I?
I am running as an independent.
I will caucus with the Democratic Party (the current
majority party).
With a surname as long and foreign
as "Takusagawa", do I really expect voters to write it
in on the ballot?
Yes.
What will I do if I
win?
In the highly unlikely event that I should win, I pledge
to sponsor and vote for legislation that promotes Free
Culture, and vote against legislation that limits it.
I pledge do abstain from all other issues.
In light of this esquivalience, if you should come to
need a powerful Massachusetts voice in the Senate
regarding an issue unrelated to Free Culture, I would
encourage you to contact Massachusetts's other at-large
Senator, John
Kerry.
What will I do if I
lose?
If my life permits, I will run again on this same issue
in 2012, presumably against the re-election campaign of
whomever wins in January, taking what I have learned from
this campaign to do better in the next.
If not, I hope I may have inspired someone else to do the
same.
Or, perhaps optimistically, copyright law will have been
fixed by then.
