Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig IIIis an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but withdrew before the primaries...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth3 June 1961
CountryUnited States of America
law tickets death-penalty
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.
ideas government support
Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.
taken mean missing
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.
strong cutting media
There are a lot of people who say we need to cut the amount of money that's spent in politics. I'm not sure that I agree. But I am sure that if you were talking about cutting the amount of money spent in politics, the media would have a strong interest in opposing you, because they make an enormous amount of money from political advertisements.
two presidential reform
If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.
art creativity reuse
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.
mean patents doe
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.
ideas citizens way
I'm pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can't work.
media danger produce
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.
ideas people culture
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically.
long creative inability
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.
brother care way
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.
space intellectual way
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.
creativity past innovation
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.