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consumers from using the goods they purchase in a way that is fair to creators.”

Change, it seemed, was a-coming.

BUT IT DIDN’T. Lessig saw it early on. He had supported Obama’s rise to president with enthusiasm and hope, but by 2010 was writing in US magazine The Nation of his disappointment. Lessig’s work had shifted from copyright reform to what he saw as political corruption through the influence of lobbyists and money. He wrote of how “a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed . . . Obama has given up the rhetoric of . . . a campaign that promised to ‘challenge the broken system in Washington’ and to ‘fundamentally change the way Washington works’.” That promise was gone, Lessig wrote.

And one promise with which he would have been familiar was around copyright.

Lessig had long argued for copyright law reform. He wanted copyright regulation linked to the use of works rather than ownership of them — not to punish use and sharing but to liberate knowledge and culture for the betterment of all.

In the end, it all changed to stay the same when Joe Biden became Obama’s running mate and eventually vice president.

Biden, a presidential contender in 1988 and 2008, had been a strong supporter of the copyright industry. He was credited with being the inspiration for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the world’s leading free encryption technology, by its creator Phil Zimmerman, who said laws championed by Biden in the 1990s led to his decision to make the technology available across the internet. Those bills did not become law but they aligned Biden with those who saw digital freedom and privacy as a threat to the US.

How Biden really felt about copyright became clear during his time as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002. The committee held an inquiry called: “Examining the Theft of American Intellectual Property At Home and Abroad”. Opening the inquiry, Biden said he did so aware of his role as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs because “we are discussing an issue that is . . . a crime, pure and simple”. He told the committee:

“The New York Times recently reported that illegal copies of The Lord of the Rings a film just recently released in movie

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