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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
Around
Property
World
Americans
Intellectual
View
Progress
Views
Perfect
Selling
Comes
Protection

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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.
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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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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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Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
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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
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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.
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My claim is that we should focus on the values of liberty... If there is not government to insist on those values, then who? ... The single unifying force should be that we govern ourselves.
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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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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.
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While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
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There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.
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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.
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A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.
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I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We always build on the past the past always tries to stop us.
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[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.
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Winner take all does not exist in the Constitution. It's a restriction imposed on the electors by the states.
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