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
Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
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?
All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.
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.
I'm focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov't to get back to solving real problems.
A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.
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.
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.
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).
Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
[Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfare
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.