Quotes from 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.

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.

But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy—one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives—is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We've settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy," where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.

Esse protecionismo não visa proteger os artistas. Na verdade, esse é um protecionismo que visa proteger certas formas de negócio. As corporações ameaçadas pelo potencial da Internet em mudar a forma como tanto a cultura comercial quanto a não-comercial é feita e compartilhada se uniram para induzir os legisladores a usarem a lei para as protegerem. É o caso da RCA contra Armstrong; é o sonho dos Causbys.

The struggle in that world will not be government's. It will be to assure that essential liberties are preserved in this environment of perfect control. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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'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.

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