Meet Mr Rights

"Lessig helped the corporation meet its legal challenge. It is his Creative Commons licence that the BBC has refashioned to get the archive off the ground. The history of this licence is embedded in a wider struggle against the current copyright system, and is Lessig's attempt to design some flexibility back into a system he believes will choke internet-enabled innovation. 'It is incredible that at a time when we have an unprecedented power to distribute ideas around the world, we have a growing body of restrictive intellectual property law that forbids us to do so,' he says. "