I got to be a professor because I realized I didn't have the discipline to work on problems I didn't find interesting. Slowly I got drawn into activism as a law professor. And the first thing that drew me in was the Internet. I realized in the one hand there was enormous potential for creativity and commerce and people to connect in all sorts of ways. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. The Internet has these amazing features protecting privacy, protecting free speech because of its code and the government and private industry has an interest in changing that code. They would much rather be able to surveil everything you do. Much rather be able to control your free speech. Much rather be able to control you in this space than to let you be free. Large majority of the public agrees that the spying is necessary. What others see it as an unprecedented infringement on our civil liberties, Lawrence Lassig also warned us. He was one of the first to see the promise of the new technology and its peril. What we saw over the last 20 years was increasing changes to the way the Internet is, to enable this massive surveillance. Hope the technology brings Edward Snowden to the screen. There he is, Edward Snowden. Oh, good. But I sitting my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president. I became increasingly active in trying to push back against this kind of crazy regulation over regulation of what the Internet was and copyright was the first big area of that fight when it wasn't the only one. Hope you write is eternal. I'll be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remix it. We're joined copyright owners. I'm okay with that. You can totally remix this. I'm fine with it. I'm fighting for network neutrality. What we come to call network neutrality, way back in the old days we called it open access, basically guaranteeing competition with broadband providers. My book, Code of the Laws of Cyberspace, was published in the late 90s. And just at that period, you know, the Internet was taking off. I remember Jimmy Wales writing me before Wikipedia was there and saying, you know, would you be able to help? Aaron Swartz was somebody who I would meet on the speaking circuit. You know, I was going around giving talks about Internet and about how to think about freedom and the context of Internet. And he was this 12 or 13 or 14 year old kid in the audience asking the smartest questions and being the most engaged. Seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question, how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? Copyright policy, Internet policy. So long as there is this fundamental corruption in the way our government works. And I said to him, you know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field. He says, you mean as an academic? It's not your field. I said, yeah, it's an academic, it's not my field. What about as a citizen? As a citizen? He was an Internet genius, focused obsessively on how we could devote his life to making the world a better place. When we decided to launch this project called Creative Commons, Aaron at the age of 14 was recommended as the chief technology officer for this organization. Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Friday. He hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old. The government was not going to stop before he admitted that he was a felon when a world where the architects of the financial crisis died regularly at the White House. It's ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a web page over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? I felt a real urgency to make that death not meaningless. On January 11th, the anniversary of Aaron's death, we began a walk that ended on January 24th. Total 200 people joined us across this walk. We arrived on the anniversary of an extraordinary woman's birth, a woman named Granny D. Granny D has started a walk from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. It's 3,200 miles. She arrived at the age of 90 with a sign in her chest that said campaign finance reform. And what was astonishing to me is something I completely did not expect to find was the passion and anger that there was about this issue. We had found in a poll that 96% of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. Money buys results in Congress. Three-quarters of Americans believe money buys results in Congress. Right now in America, to be able to run for office, the first thing you have to do is to raise money to run for office. And you raise money not from all of us. You raise money from a tiny fraction of the 1%. The one really great thing about being a father is to dream of the future of your children. And my view is if you love your children, you do everything you can to make it so they have a future that you're proud to leave them with. Corruption is tied to a fundamental inequality in the way we've allowed political power in American development. You could be obsessed about the dangers of climate change or the debts or you could be deeply focused on Wall Street and the instability of our economy. You could look at the failure of social security. But when you step back and you think about it, they're all tied to the same issue. They're all tied to this corrupting influence of money in politics. There are certain citizens at the front of the line and those at the citizens of the government bends over backwards to serve. I went to Congress where instead of thinking about how to raise more dollars, they think about what makes sense for public policy. There are lots of people who look at members of Congress and say, oh, they're all crux. They're all evil people. And I don't believe any of them. They honestly believe they can help. And then they get into the system that forces them to bend over backwards in ways that's completely corrupting of our underlying democracy. The thing that we know in Massachusetts where our center to Elizabeth Warren is, the quote, system is rigged, right? The system is rigged. And what follows from that is if we do not fix the rigged system that all these dreams are fantasies. We've got to commit ourselves to equality of citizens. Every citizen, and we have to commit ourselves to enraicing, finally, that inequality.