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

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
Perfect
Selling
Comes
Protection
Around
Property
World
Americans
Intellectual
View
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More quotes by Lawrence Lessig

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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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Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
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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.
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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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Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned.
Lawrence Lessig
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Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.
Lawrence Lessig
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If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.
Lawrence Lessig
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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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One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
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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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.
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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
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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
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I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living.
Lawrence Lessig
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When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
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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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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
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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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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