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
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.
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.
While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.
Distinguished Chinese works can also be more easily accessed by the world.
don't really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.
We have built upon the 'all rights reserved' concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary 'some rights reserved' approach.
This shift is bizarre, ... If welfare recipients can be denied their benefits because they fail to complete a benefits form properly, then I can't see the unfairness in requiring those who demand state support to defend their monopoly similarly by filling out a registration form.
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.
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.
When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
We adopt this strategy now because there's an urgency to this debate. Over time, the space of free expression has shrunk.
What you want to do is to get a kind of revenue that right now you don't get at all,
Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.
I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first time the extraordinary expanse of copyright regulation and its regulation of ordinary free-speech activities.