Lawrence Lessig Quotes

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.

The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.

Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good - for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut."

If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.

We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter.

Freedom is about stopping the past.

In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

Winner take all does not exist in the Constitution. It's a restriction imposed on the electors by the states.

When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

[Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfare

I don't support direct democracy because I want a life, and that means I want to select people who work for me who do that sort of work for me.

My work about corruption is to get people to see it less as a moral issue (right/wrong) and more as an economic issue (economies of influence and their effect).

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.

Money corrupts the process of reasoning.

For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own, society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were lost.

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.

You and I both know that as long as our representatives are held hostage to their funders - and their funders are not all of us - our system will not work

Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.

One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.

There's no reason for the electors to overrule the popular choice.

The popular choice, by more than 2 million votes, is a completely qualified candidate for president.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

We ought to be respecting the principle of equality.

I'm pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can't work.

I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.

Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.

There is still the illusion that if we could declare corporations are not people or that money is not speech, all would be solved. Regardless of the good in those ideas, it wouldn't.

Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.

Companies will often use the legal system to scare people away from attacking them. But we all should be free to make critical statements about anybody, unless those statements are malicious.

Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?

I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They're not.

I spend as little time with lawmakers as possible. Many are great. And more than you expect want real change. But they're not going to do anything till we, the outsiders, force them to adopt it.

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.