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. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them. This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. 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.
American academic, political activist
Lawrence Lessig (born 3 June 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is most famous as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. He is a director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advisory board member of the Sunlight Foundation and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Also Known As:
Larry Lessig
Alternative Names:
Lester Lawrence Lessig III
From Wikidata (CC0)
I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access — exactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on — I was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before — and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives. … Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how — how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed. Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of — you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t — I don’t — I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody — this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government.
There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed. … So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.
Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation. We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can't show it's going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly.
Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. 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.
"Os participantes das redes de compartilhamento de arquivos compartilham diferentes tipos de conteúdos. Podemos dividi-los em quatro tipos.
A-Esses são aqueles que usam as redes P2P como substitutos para a compra de conteúdo. Dessa forma, quando um novo CD da Pitty é lançado, ao invés de comprar o CD, eles simplesmente o copiam. Podemos argumentar se todos os que copiaram as músicas poderiam comprá-las caso o compartilhamento não permitisse baixá-las de graça. Muitos provavelmente não poderiam, mas claramente alguns o fariam. Os últimos são os alvos da categoria A: usuários que baixam conteúdo ao invés de comprá-lo.
B-Há alguns que usam as redes de compartilhamento de arquivos para experimentarem música antes de a comprar. Dessa forma, um amigo manda para outro um MP3 de um artista do qual ele nunca ouviu falar. Esse outro amigo então compra CDs desse artistas. Isso é uma forma de publicidade direcionada, e que tem grandes chances de sucesso. Se o amigo que está recomendando a música não ganha nada recomendando porcarias, então pode-se imaginar que suas recomendações sejam realmente boas. O saldo final desse compartilhamento pode aumentar as compras de música.
C-Há muitos que usam as redes de compartilhamento de arquivos para conseguirem materiais sob copgright que não são mais vendidos ou que não podem ser comprados ou cujos custos da compra fora da Net seriam muito grandes. Esses uso da rede de compartilhamento de arquivos está entre os mais recompensadores para a maioria. Canções que eram parte de nossa infância mais que desapareceram há muito tempo atrás do mercado magicamente reaparecem na rede. (Um amigo meu me disse que quando ele descobriu o Napster, ele passou um fim de semana inteiro "relembrando" músicas antigas. Ele estava surpreso com a gama e diversidade do conteúdo disponibilizado.) Para conteúdo não vendido, isso ainda é tecnicamente uma violação de copyright, embora já que o dono do copgright não está mais vendendo esse conteúdo, o dano econômico é