Lawrence Lessig
Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: People
But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.Collection: Silly
All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.Collection: Motivation
We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.Collection: Past
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 workCollection: Long
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.Collection: War
Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.Collection: Law
There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.Collection: Government
One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.Collection: Past
While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection.Collection: Facts
I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.Collection: Creativity
We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.Collection: Creativity
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them.Collection: Ideas
I am big supporter of the idea of a global anti-corruption movement - but one that begins by recognizing that the architecture of corruption is different in different countries. The corruption we suffer is not the same as the corruption that debilitates Africa. But it is both corruption, and both need to be eliminated if the faith in democracy is not going to be destroyed.Collection: Country
Code plus law is combining to reduce rights consumers used to have.Collection: Rights
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.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Mean
Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned.Collection: Thinking
When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.Collection: Thinking
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. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.Collection: Simple
The popular choice is not elected as president.Collection: Choices
The value of "one person, one vote," the value of equality, is a value that was given to us more than 50 years ago as a central part of our constitutional tradition. So, under that principle, we ought to be applying the same standard today that I would have said we should have applied a year ago.Collection: Should Have
[Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfareCollection: Dollars
When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.Collection: Government
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).Collection: Issues
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.Collection: Strong
Everybody's vote should count equally in the United States.Collection: United States
We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.Collection: Song
It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.Collection: People
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.Collection: Art
As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.Collection: Moving
Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.Collection: Doe
Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.Collection: America
The popular choice, by more than 2 million votes, is a completely qualified candidate for president.Collection: Choices
The Electoral College is a project that calls on their judgment. If we don't like it, we can talk about how to eliminate it. I'm not quite convinced we should eliminate it completely. I think it's important to have a final check be somebody other than the Supreme Court. But given that it's there, we should take it seriously. And taking it seriously says they should exercise their judgment according to the moral values, the principles that are part of our constitutional tradition today. And those principles say equality.Collection: Exercise
We ought to be respecting the principle of equality.Collection: Principles
I think the archaic idea is actually winner take all, because the principle of "one person, one vote" is a principle that was introduced as a fundamental principle in American law in 1962, long after states had moved to "one person, one vote."Collection: Thinking
There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.Collection: Commitment
The principle, that should be a fundamental principle in our democracy, the principle of "one person, one vote," says that the vote of every American should count equally. And if it does, Hillary Clinton should be the president of the United States.Collection: Democracy
There's no reason for the electors to overrule the popular choice.Collection: Choices
I find focusing clearly on the problem is the first step to seeing a solution. The problem is (a) the insane amount of time spent raising money from (b) a freakishly tiny proportion of America. Basically .05% are the "relevant funders" of campaigns, meaning candidates can't help but be overly sensitive to the views of that tiny fraction relative to the rest of us. IF that's the problem, THEN the solution is to spread the funders out: to increase the range of us who are the relevant funders of elections, through schemes like vouchers or coupons given to every voter.Collection: America
I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.Collection: Real
I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't.Collection: Thinking
If zero percent of the elites support something, very low chance it's going to pass, if 100% support something, very high chance it's going to pass. Same thing for organized interest groups. But for the average voter, it's a flat line. Which says it doesn't matter whether zero percent of the public believes something or 100% of the average voters believe something - it doesn't affect the probability that that thing will be enacted.Collection: Zero
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Wall
Here's what we [Americans] need: a 30 second you tube video of some guy at a party constantly checking out everyone else at the party, while he pretends to be speaking to the other person. We're the other person. The guy are the politicians. And the distraction is the corruption: We need a Congress that can afford to talk to us. For at least one drink or so.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Ideas