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Lawrence Lessig Quotes about Creativity

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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.

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
Creativity, Technology, Opportunity
Lawrence Lessig (2004). “Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity”, p.151, Penguin

Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?

Lawrence Lessig
Creativity, Technology, Law
Lawrence Lessig (2009). “Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy”, p.107, A&C Black

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

Lawrence Lessig
Creativity, Technology, Law
Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.

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
Creativity, Rights, Library
"Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity". Book by Lawrence Lessig, 2004.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.

Lawrence Lessig
Art, Creativity, Reuse
"May the Source Be With You". www.wired.com. December 21, 2001.

The crystal ball has a question mark in its center. There are some fundamental choices to be made. We will either choose to continue to wage a hopeless war to preserve the existing architecture for copyright by upping the stakes and using better weapons to make sure that people respect it. If we do this, public support for copyright will continue to weaken, pushing creativity underground and producing a generation that is alienated from the copyright concept.

Lawrence Lessig
War, Creativity, People
WIPO Magazine Interview, www.wipo.int. February, 2011.

Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network.

Lawrence Lessig
Creativity, Perfect

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
Creativity, Law, Copying
Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.

I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.

Lawrence Lessig
Creativity, Artist, Thinking
WIPO Magazine Interview, www.wipo.int. February 2011.

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
Creativity, Years, Law
Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.

Creativity builds upon the public domain. The battle that we're fighting now is about whether the public domain will continue to be fed by creative works after their copyright expires. That has been our tradition but that tradition has been perverted in the last generation. We're trying to use the Constitution to reestablish what has always been taken for granted--that the public domain would grow each year with new creative work.

Lawrence Lessig
Taken, Creativity, Fighting

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

Lawrence Lessig
Creativity, Past, Innovation
Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.

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