Lawrence Lessig Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good - for society, and not just for monopoly holders.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : "May the Source Be With You". Article adapted from "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World", www.wired.com. December 01, 2001.
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“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).”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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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.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : "One Planet, One Net" symposium, October 10, 1998.
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“I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : Lawrence Lessig “Free Culture”, Lulu.com
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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?”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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“If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : "May the Source Be With You". Wired magazine, www.wired.com. December 9, 2001.
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“I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They're not.”
-- 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 directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“I find focusing clearly on the problem is the first step to seeing a solution. The problem is (a) the insane amount of time spent raising money from (b) a freakishly tiny proportion of America. Basically .05% are the "relevant funders" of campaigns, meaning candidates can't help but be overly sensitive to the views of that tiny fraction relative to the rest of us. IF that's the problem, THEN the solution is to spread the funders out: to increase the range of us who are the relevant funders of elections, through schemes like vouchers or coupons given to every voter.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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“I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“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 -
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“Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“Here's what we [Americans] need: a 30 second you tube video of some guy at a party constantly checking out everyone else at the party, while he pretends to be speaking to the other person. We're the other person. The guy are the politicians. And the distraction is the corruption: We need a Congress that can afford to talk to us. For at least one drink or so.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“I spend as little time with lawmakers as possible. Many are great. And more than you expect want real change. But they're not going to do anything till we, the outsiders, force them to adopt it.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. July 2, 2013.
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“There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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“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 -
“The more important point, however, is not about what the money does. It's about what has to be done to get the money. The effect of the money might be (democratically) benign. But what is done to secure that money is not necessarily benign. To miss this point is to betray the Robin Hood fallacy: the fact that the loot was distributed justly doesn't excuse the means taken to secure it.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.”
-- Lawrence LessigSource : Keynote address at the Open Source Convention, July 24, 2002.
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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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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“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 -
“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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Lawrence Lessig -
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“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 -
“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
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