Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig showed up to deliver his keynote speech Wednesday night unshaven and fresh from a family vacation in Costa Rica. He wanted to address a problem journalism educators cannot ignore: the potential chill existing laws may have on Internet creativity.

Lessig said copyright laws need to be updated for the digital age to allow for access and creativity. The Internet has acted to remind us that copyright laws are dated, he said. Music and video access is limited, for example, but consumers are still allowed wide access to text.

“We have to answer the question of whether restrictions of text will be applied generally or if we want the restrictions of music and video applied generally,” he said.

The author of several books on the Internet and its impact on community, Lessig asserts that traditional and absolute copyright laws should be replaced in this digital age with a “some rights reserved” policy that allows content creators to choose from a variety of cost-effective licensing options.

“If you go along with the system as it is, you are effectively saying you believe in the ‘all rights reserved’ model,” Lessig wrote in “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Objectivity.”

Lessig added that flexible options allow creators to reap copyright benefits while sharing aspects of their innovations with others.

The goal of more flexible options, he said, is to provide “commoners” with more access to ideas, ultimately opening the gates of innovation and constructing a new public domain.

Lessig has a track record for getting the attention of the elite. Steve Forbes, editor in chief of Forbes magazine, has endorsed his ideas in the past.

And for two consecutive years, Business Week has named Lessig one of its 25 top e-biz leaders. The magazine also reported his successful litigation in protecting the cable system competition during the AOL-Time Warner case.

In addition, Lessig founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, a research organization that studies the interaction of law and technology and the impact these disciplines have on privacy and diversity. He also served as a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Seventh Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.