Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by Lawrence Lessig - Page 2

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.

I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living.

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.

My claim is that we should focus on the values of liberty... If there is not government to insist on those values, then who? ... The single unifying force should be that we govern ourselves.

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.

The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times."

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.

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

Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional.

"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving.

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.

One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that "apolitical" means "you lose." It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first.

All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.

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.

In a time of polarized politics there's one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics.

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.

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.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

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.

Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?

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.

We ought to be respecting the principle of equality.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

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

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

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.

Freedom is about stopping the past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?

It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history -- free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

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

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.

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.

Money corrupts the process of reasoning.

[Conservatives] go to church, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. ... They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. It's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share.

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.

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

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.

I don't care if the Koch brothers or Soros spend their money to promote one candidate or another. I care about members of Congress spending 30%-70% of their time raising money from .05% of us. Change the way we fund elections and you change the corruption.

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

Some blame the drug companies. I don't. They are corporations. Their managers are ordered by law to make money for the corporation. They push a certain patent policy not because of ideals,but because it is the policy that makes them the most money. And it only makes them the most money because of a certain corruption within our political system-a corruption the drug companies are certainly not responsible for. The corruption is our own politicians' failure of integrity.

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

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

Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."