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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 in… - Lawrence Lessig
" "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.
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About Lawrence Lessig
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.
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Also Known As
Also Known As:
Larry Lessig
Alternative Names:
Lester Lawrence Lessig III
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Additional quotes by 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. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights — property rights of a historically extreme form — that makes their bigness bad.
It is valuable copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended. Mickey Mouse and "Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for copyright owners to ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright extensions is not that Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
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