Lawrence Lessig Quotes

One thing we know about incentives is you can't incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, [even if] we can give him all the money in the world.

Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state. Liberty there, as anywhere, will come from a state of a certain kind. We build a world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self-conscious control, but by setting it in a place where a particular kind of self-conscious control survives. We build liberty as our founders did, by setting society upon a certain constitution.

A TV a cabo também nasceu de uma forma de pirataria.
Quando os empreendedores do cabo começaram a fornecer às comunidades com TV a cabo em 1948, muitos deles negaram-se a pagar às redes de TV pelo conteúdo que eles redistribuíam aos seus consumidores. Mesmo quando as companhias de cabo começaram a vender acesso às redes de TV, eles negavam-se a pagar pelo que elas vendiam. As companhias do cabo estavam, na prática, Napsterizando o conteúdo das redes de TV, mas de forma pior do que qualquer coisa que o Napster tenha feito o Napster jamais cobrou pelo conteúdo que ele permitia que os outros dessem.

Mas apenas eleições não fazem uma democracia. Democracia quer dizer poder para o povo, mas poder quer dizer algo mais que apenas eleições. Em nossa tradição isso também significa controle através de críticas racionais.

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.

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.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity — "property" — confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.

We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.

The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.

É dessa forma que algumas vezes a lei funciona. Nem sempre de forma tão trágica, e raramente com esse drama heróico, mas algumas vezes é assim que a lei funciona. Para começar, o governo e suas agências são vítimas de cooptação. Elas normalmente são cooptadas quando um interesse poderoso é ameaçado tanto por uma mudança legal quanto técnica. Esse interesse poderoso freqüentemente exerce sua influência em um governo para que este o proteja. A retórica para essa proteção é sempre baseada, claro, no bem público, mas a verdade é muito diferente.

Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public domain is nothing more than "legal piracy." But it is not piracy when the law allows it; and in our constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter. 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. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered, we have set up a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly extended, and extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for the public domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.

"Existe um outro motivo para o fato dos blogs terem um ciclo de vida diferente dos principais meios de comunicação. Como Dave Winer, um dos pais desse movimento e um desenvolvedor de software por várias décadas, me disse, uma outra diferença é a ausência de "conflitos de interesses" provocados por motivos financeiros. "Eu penso que você tem que remover esse conflito de interesses" do jornalismo, Winer me disse. "Um jornalista amador simplesmente não tem tal conflito de interesses, ou o conflito de interesses é tão facilmente detectável que você pode o remover do caminho facilmente"."

"That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" — not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" — a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."

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. 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.

For the first time that evening, a small idea was uttered by the representative of this extraordinary company. Schmidt spoke of invigorating the Google PAC, and pushing harder to get their side of the issue better heard.
And I thought, Wow. This is a Google solution to this, the most important problem facing this republic? This the most they can imagine?