Lawrence Lessig Quotes - Page 2

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.

Freedom is about stopping the past.

Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Money corrupts the process of reasoning.

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.

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.

I am big supporter of the idea of a global anti-corruption movement - but one that begins by recognizing that the architecture of corruption is different in different countries. The corruption we suffer is not the same as the corruption that debilitates Africa. But it is both corruption, and both need to be eliminated if the faith in democracy is not going to be destroyed.

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.

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.

Code plus law is combining to reduce rights consumers used to have.

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.

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.

Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

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.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.

There are a lot of people who say we need to cut the amount of money that's spent in politics. I'm not sure that I agree. But I am sure that if you were talking about cutting the amount of money spent in politics, the media would have a strong interest in opposing you, because they make an enormous amount of money from political advertisements.

[Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfare

The value of "one person, one vote," the value of equality, is a value that was given to us more than 50 years ago as a central part of our constitutional tradition. So, under that principle, we ought to be applying the same standard today that I would have said we should have applied a year ago.

Everybody's vote should count equally in the United States.

The popular choice is not elected as president.

My work about corruption is to get people to see it less as a moral issue (right/wrong) and more as an economic issue (economies of influence and their effect).

When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

When government disappears, its not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.