Lawrence Lessig quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Lawrence Lessig

Top Lawrence Lessig Quotes

Browse top 39 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Lawrence Lessig.

Favorite Lawrence Lessig Quotes

1. "Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law." ~ Lawrence Lessig

2. "Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market." ~ Lawrence Lessig

3. "Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's Dilemma": the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer." ~ Lawrence Lessig

4. "But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately, business models. Thus we must keep i mind the other values or objectives that might also be affected by this war. We must make sure this war doesn't cost more than it is worth. We must be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price we're willing to pay." ~ Lawrence Lessig

5. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

6. "A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now." ~ Lawrence Lessig

7. "As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture." ~ Lawrence Lessig

8. "This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth." ~ Lawrence Lessig

9. "A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid." ~ Lawrence Lessig

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

11. "Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies." ~ Lawrence Lessig

12. "Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt." ~ Lawrence Lessig

13. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

14. "If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities." ~ Lawrence Lessig

15. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

16. "So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically." ~ Lawrence Lessig

17. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

18. "We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying." ~ Lawrence Lessig

19. "Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution." ~ Lawrence Lessig

20. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

21. "So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity." ~ Lawrence Lessig

22. "And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B." ~ Lawrence Lessig

23. "Why should it be that just when technology ismost encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?" ~ Lawrence Lessig

24. "If "piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if "if value, then right" is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of "big media" today- film, records, radio, and cable TV-was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation's pirates join this generation's country club-until now." ~ Lawrence Lessig

25. "If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have muchless driving." ~ Lawrence Lessig

26. "That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture"—not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past." ~ Lawrence Lessig

27. "Freedom is about stopping the past." ~ Lawrence Lessig

28. "On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it." ~ Lawrence Lessig

29. "[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy." ~ Lawrence Lessig

30. "Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables." ~ Lawrence Lessig

31. "The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do." ~ Lawrence Lessig

32. "Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally." ~ Lawrence Lessig

33. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

34. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

35. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

36. "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." ~ Lawrence Lessig

37. "All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations." ~ Lawrence Lessig

38. "When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place." ~ Lawrence Lessig

39. "Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster." ~ Lawrence Lessig

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