Quotes by Lawrence Lessig

About Lawrence Lessig:

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic, political activist, and attorney. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. As an attorney, he is a member of the Illinois Bar. Lessig is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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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

Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technolog...

Lawrence Lessig

Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-...

Lawrence Lessig

[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the produc...

Lawrence Lessig

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective pa...

Lawrence Lessig

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.

Lawrence Lessig

If “piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if “if value, then right” is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of “big media” today- film, records,...

Lawrence Lessig

Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.

Lawrence Lessig

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 direct...

Lawrence Lessig

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 ...

Lawrence Lessig

But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately, business ...

Lawrence Lessig

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.

Lawrence Lessig

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.

Lawrence Lessig

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

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.

Lawrence Lessig

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

Lawrence Lessig

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

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.

Lawrence Lessig

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

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

Lawrence Lessig

Author Bio

  • NameLawrence Lessig
  • DescriptionAmerican academic, political activist. Founder, Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Creative Commons. Proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, radio frequency spectrum, esp. in technology applications.
  • AliasesLarry Lessig
  • BornJune 3, 1961
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJurist
  • AwardsWebby Lifetime Achievement Award