LAWRENCE LESSIG QUOTES
American academic & political activist (1961- )
There are a lot of people who say we need to cut the amount of money that's spent in politics. I'm not sure that I agree. But I am sure that if you were talking about cutting the amount of money spent in politics, the media would have a strong interest in opposing you, because they make an enormous amount of money from political advertisements.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Lawrence Lessig Has a Moonshot Plan to Halt Our Slide Toward Plutocracy", Moyers & Company, April 25, 2014
The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Free Culture
I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the consequences of this silliness will be much more profound.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
introduction, Free Culture
The outside is us. It is the we who have other lives. The we who want to do different things. The we who find basketball or hockey more interesting than congressional politics. Or who believe that an afternoon helping at a homeless shelter or a morning at our church is a better use of our time than going door to door for a candidate for Congress. We, the outside, live our life (almost) never even thinking about this thing we call government--even though, for many of us, this thing called government is the single largest financial expenditure that we make every year. But then something happens, and we can't ignore the inside anymore. And then we start to wake up. Limbs twitch. Eyes open, ever so slightly. An arm moves, then a leg. And a lumbering and clumsy giant finally comes awake.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic
Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
I think we need to recognize that Americans are realistic, and they're not going to rally around a change they don't believe has any hope of being achieved. So you could either say, "Let's give up," or you can say, "What is the kind of change -- the kind of strategy -- that could actually have an effect?" And how do you convince America of that strategy? That's ultimately the challenge here.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Lawrence Lessig Has a Moonshot Plan to Halt Our Slide Toward Plutocracy", Moyers & Company, April 25, 2014
Sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. 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
The Future of Ideas
If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Lawrence Lessig Has a Moonshot Plan to Halt Our Slide Toward Plutocracy", Moyers & Company, April 25, 2014
Creativity builds upon the public domain. The battle that we're fighting now is about whether the public domain will continue to be fed by creative works after their copyright expires. That has been our tradition but that tradition has been perverted in the last generation. We're trying to use the Constitution to reestablish what has always been taken for granted--that the public domain would grow each year with new creative work.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Righting Copyright: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", Cabinet Magazine, fall 2002
Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so. Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It's a documentary film. It's about education. It's a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It's a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don't give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It's insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that's fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
keynote address at the Open Source Convention, OSCON, July 24, 2002
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
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
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."
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"One Planet, One Net" symposium, October 10, 1998
I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first time the extraordinary expanse of copyright regulation and its regulation of ordinary free-speech activities.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", OpenP2P, January 29, 2001
While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Righting Copyright: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", Cabinet Magazine, fall 2002
All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity -- "property" -- confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. 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
The Future of Ideas
If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
keynote address at the Open Source Convention, OSCON, July 24, 2002
Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen -- the Internet -- has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", OpenP2P, January 29, 2001
Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
"Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig", OpenP2P, January 29, 2001
But whether we've won or lost, we need to trust that the government is acting for the (politically) correct reasons: liberal, if liberals have won; conservative, if conservatives have won; libertarian, if libertarians have won. We need to believe that the government is tracking the sort of interests it was intended to track.... When the actions of government conflict with those expectations, we will look beyond trust, for other reasons, to see whether they might explain the puzzle. Other reasons, such as money in the wrong places. When we find it--when we see that money was in the wrong place--it will affect us. It will weaken our trust in government. It will undermine our motivation to engage.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It
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
keynote address at the "One Planet, One Net" symposium, October 10, 1998