Campaign finance reformer Larry Lessig, the only presidential candidate thus far to sit for an interview with Gawker, is dropping his bid for the Democratic nomination. Other presidential candidates are urged to ignore this precedent and contact us to schedule an interview.

Harvard professor and campaign finance reform crusader Lawrence Lessig is running for the Democratic nomination for president. He was not allowed in tonight’s debates. Luckily, he stopped by to explain his entire platform to us.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor who has been one of America’s most active voices in the fight to reform campaign finance laws, is running for president.

A couple of friends want me to blog about how Larry Lessig has been added to the evil friends of Barack Obama at the anti-Obama parody site BarackBook. Why oh why, they ask? RTFM! The one live link on the BarackBook page explains it all: It's not Lessig's hard-to-follow opinions on copyright that honked off the right-wingers. It's this video he's shown at talks, in which a campy Jesus character gets hit by a bus. One man's Monty Python is another man's blasphemy. I wonder if the Professor would dare show a remix where, oh, let's make it Joe Biden gets run over instead. I know people who would love that.

Tonight's Bigg Digg Shindigg will be our last dance, nerd promsters. The real guitar heroes are here in Austin now, skinny pants and all. The star closing panel of the day, The Futurists Sandbox, featured slides from P. T. Anderson's lovesong to '70s porn, Boogie Nights, played to a series of monologues to eulogize Dirk Diggler as if he were a real person who died in 2025. Not even dropping Larry Lessig's name roused the crowd from Twittering. Or maybe they mistook the packed-to-capacity conference room for PureVolume.

"I never cease to be amazed when supporters of Open Source, Open Standards and the relative anarchy that such regimes allow turn to the government sector and want to do just the opposite: centralize everything." — macbeach on "free culture" advocate Lawrence "Larry" Lessig's proposal to publicly fund election campaigns.

Stanford law prof Larry Lessig announced two things yesterday in a 10-minute video that ran about 9-1/2 minutes too long. One is that he'll decide whether or not to run for Congress by March 1. The other is a plan called Change Congress. It comes down to three bullet points.

We were just tweaking Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, really, when we asked him if he planned to just study the law, or actually make it. But Lessig now says he's seriously considering a run for the late Tom Lantos's House seat. A grassroots "Draft Lessig" movement prompted him to think about it, he says. Will he or won't he? Lessig, an Obama supporter who's also riding a "change" theme, posted a video explaining his thinking:

• Thanks to that health nut Steve Jobs, your kids are gonna get Hot Wheels and Barbies in every Happy Meal from now on — just as Jobs becomes Disney's biggest stockholder, the Mouse stops signing Happy Meal toy contracts with McDonald's. [ZDNet]

Tired of camps about actual from-scratch products, Valley developers, pundits, and businessfolk mixed it up at Mashup Camp, the two-day "unconference" about remixed tech. Laughing Squid tentaclemaster Scott Beale kindly let me abuse his pics from Monday.