Quotes by Lawrence Lessig

“When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place,”

“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.”

“This shift is bizarre, ... If welfare recipients can be denied their benefits because they fail to complete a benefits form properly, then I cant see the unfairness in requiring those who demand state support to defend their monopoly similarly by filling out a registration form.”

“dont really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.”

“What you want to do is to get a kind of revenue that right now you dont get at all,”

“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.”

“This is the hard policy question. They [network operators] want total control. My point is, is there another way to give them a rate of return? I dont know.”

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

“We adopt this strategy now because theres an urgency to this debate. Over time, the space of free expression has shrunk.”

“We have built upon the all rights reserved concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary some rights reserved approach.”

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 doesnt cost more than it is worth. We must be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price were willing to pay.

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

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.

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.

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.

So, ignorant we are. But were not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isnt what we know. The question is what were capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity.

[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.

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.

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.

[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.