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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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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
Idea
Uncritically
Ideas
Monstrous
Without
Notice
Even
Deny
People
Property
Accept
Dying
Accepting

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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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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Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.
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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.
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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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Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.
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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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The popular choice is not elected as president.
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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
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One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
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