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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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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
Past
Processes
Give
Designed
Giving
Features
Great
Destroy
Respect
Modern
Society
Institutionalized
Process
Feature

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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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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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Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.
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Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I think the archaic idea is actually winner take all, because the principle of one person, one vote is a principle that was introduced as a fundamental principle in American law in 1962, long after states had moved to one person, one vote.
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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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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.
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As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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?
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One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that apolitical means you lose. It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first.
Lawrence Lessig
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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.
Lawrence Lessig