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Joichi Ito

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Joichi Ito

CEO of Creative Commons, founder of Digital Garage

In April, Lessig hand-picked Japanese Net entrepreneur Joichi Ito to take over the organization's day-to-day operations. Ito, 42, runs a venture capital firm and a Net startup incubator and has been blogging since the mid-1990s—even before the term blogging entered the lexicon. "If you look at how I've invested my time and energy, it was Internet service provider, search engine, Web-design company, blogging companies, and now Creative Commons companies," he says. "Each of those revolved around open standards, which I participated in. Each of those enabled the next layer. And all of them to me were a democratizing process that involved user participation and they typically pushed against monopolies. So Mozilla pushes against Microsoft (MSFT). ISPs push against the phone companies. And now what I'm doing with the Creative Commons pushes against the content industry. It's somewhat contrarian but if you're good at investing you usually invest against the crowd."