Law professor Lawrence Lessig made a name for himself arguing for less restrictive copyright laws in what he called the Fair Use Project. Now he's decided to shift his focus to the problem of money in politics and how to change the way money and access interact in Washington. Here he talks with Dan Slater of the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog about what prompted him to take up the fight.This is Lessig's analysis of the problem, and the importance of changing the way we finance our campaigns:Now you’re changing your focus to eliminating the ill-effects of money in politics. Why the switch? Well, I came to realize that there was a more fundamental problem. The intellectual issues at stake in the copyright debate aren’t very hard. But you look across the range of issues that the government is involved in there’s a whole host that, in my view, are affected by the corroding influence of money. I don’t have any problem with money. Money is great in the right place, but it’s not great in your engine. And it’s not great in certain ways that distort the policy-making process.What exactly is distorted?In the academic context, there’s corruption in the way that testimony is being bought, which changes how people research. But it’s most directly seen in the political process – from the system of earmarks to extraordinarily expensive campaigns. So you can’t deal with the issues until you deal with how money influences the conversation?It’s like an alcoholic who might be losing his job, his wife and his liver. Those are all serious problems, but until you deal with the alcoholism itself you’re not going to fix them. Politics is the same. We’ve obviously got problems in Iraq and with the economy, but until you deal with the more fundamental issue of how money affects decision-making in those areas, you’re not going to solve those problems.Interesting analogy, no?