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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

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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
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More quotes by Lawrence Lessig

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Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
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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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
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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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Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter.
Lawrence Lessig
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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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Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does 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.
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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Winner take all does not exist in the Constitution. It's a restriction imposed on the electors by the states.
Lawrence Lessig
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So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them.
Lawrence Lessig
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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.
Lawrence Lessig
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We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.
Lawrence Lessig
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Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
Lawrence Lessig
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If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving.
Lawrence Lessig
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A free culture is not a culture without property it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.
Lawrence Lessig
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Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.
Lawrence Lessig
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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.
Lawrence Lessig
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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
Lawrence Lessig
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If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.
Lawrence Lessig