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Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

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
Sound
Times
Language
Writing
People
Latin
Video
Modern

More quotes by Lawrence Lessig

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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.
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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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.
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 a time of polarized politics there's one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics.
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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Money corrupts the process of reasoning.
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
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The popular choice is not elected as 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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Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.
Lawrence Lessig
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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.
Lawrence Lessig
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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