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

Lawrence Lessig

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Lawrence Lessig
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 3
Computer Scientist
Jurist
Lawyer
Non-Fiction Writer
Political Activist
Politician
Professor
Teacher
Rapid City
South Dakota
Larry Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III
Restrictive
Encouraging
Creativity
Technology
Law

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.
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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
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I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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The popular choice, by more than 2 million votes, is a completely qualified candidate for president.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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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.
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A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.
Lawrence Lessig
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Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.
Lawrence Lessig
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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.
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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.
Lawrence Lessig
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We always build on the past the past always tries to stop us.
Lawrence Lessig
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Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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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
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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.
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There are very few people in our society who are actually free to say what they believe. I am in an extremely fortunate position in having this enormous gift of freedom and believe I should try to use it to do something useful for society. As long as I feel as if I have something to say, I’ll continue to try to do that.
Lawrence Lessig