Quotes from Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.

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

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

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."

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.

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.

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.