163 Quotes by Lawrence Lessig

I advocate for protecting the liberty of the net, and securing privacy. I argue against people who believe both are somehow given automatically. They’re not.

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.

I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov’t with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov’t than our gov’t.

On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.

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?

Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn’t easily do them legally.

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.

When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it’s obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

By the time Apple’s Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.