Lawrence Lessig Quotes & Sayings

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. — Lawrence Lessig

The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

If "piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if "if value, then right" is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of "big media" today- film, records, radio, and cable TV-was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation's pirates join this generation's country club-until now. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. — Lawrence Lessig

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. — Lawrence Lessig

The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win. — Lawrence Lessig

Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter. — Lawrence Lessig

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.
— Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. — Lawrence Lessig

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal. — Lawrence Lessig

I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They're not. — Lawrence Lessig

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. — Lawrence Lessig

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 important legal device. — Lawrence Lessig

There is a regulation of behavior on the Internet and in cyberspace, but that regulation is imposed primarily through code. The differences in the regulations effected through code distinguish different parts of the Internet and cyberspace. In some places, life is fairly free; in other places, it is more controlled. And the difference between these spaces is simply a difference in the architectures of control
that is, a difference in code. — Lawrence Lessig

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

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" - not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." 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. — Lawrence Lessig

So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

But as well as copy-shop piracy, there is another kind of "taking" that is more directly related to the Internet. That taking, too, seems wrong to many, and it is wrong much of the time. Before we paint this taking "piracy," however, we should understand its nature a bit more. For the harm of this taking is significantly more ambiguous than outright copying, and the law should account for that ambiguity, as it has so often done in the past. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law. — Lawrence Lessig

For the first time that evening, a small idea was uttered by the representative of this extraordinary company. Schmidt spoke of invigorating the Google PAC, and pushing harder to get their side of the issue better heard.
And I thought, Wow. This is a Google solution to this, the most important problem facing this republic? This the most they can imagine? — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

Money corrupts the process of reasoning. — Lawrence Lessig

I spend as little time with lawmakers as possible. Many are great. And more than you expect want real change. But they're not going to do anything till we, the outsiders, force them to adopt it. — Lawrence Lessig

Why should it be that just when technology is
most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive? — Lawrence Lessig

As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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? — Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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 build upon as they see fit. — Lawrence Lessig

[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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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." — Lawrence Lessig

The question is: Which means best advances the regulator's goal, subject to the constraints (whether normative or material) that the regulator must recognize? My — Lawrence Lessig

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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? — Lawrence Lessig

Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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). — Lawrence Lessig

Every schoolchild learns of L'Enfant's design to make an invasion of Washington difficult. But more interesting is the placement of the White House relative to the Capitol. The distance between them is one mile, and at the time it was a mile through difficult terrain (the mall was a swamp). The distance was a barrier meant to tilt the intercourse between Congress and the president by making it marginally more difficult for them to connect - and thereby more difficult for the executive to control the legislature. — Lawrence Lessig

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

I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. — Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. — Lawrence Lessig

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 of copyright for software is effectively unlimited. — Lawrence Lessig

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. — Lawrence Lessig

The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do. — Lawrence Lessig

[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. — Lawrence Lessig

On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it. — Lawrence Lessig

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 every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities. — Lawrence Lessig

Code plus law is combining to reduce rights consumers used to have. — Lawrence Lessig

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. — Lawrence Lessig