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.”

“Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.”

“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.”

“A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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-regulated-regulated market.”

“[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.”

“Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.”

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

“Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.”

“When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.”

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

“A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.”

“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.”

“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 technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.”

“As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.”

“The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.”

“By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.”

“A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.”