Lawrence Lessig Quotes

45 quotes in 693 categories

• 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…
• Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.
• Freedom is about stopping the past.
• 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…
• 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…
• Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
• 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…
• Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
• A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
• A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.
• All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
• Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
• 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…
• Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
• All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.
• 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…

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