163 Quotes by Lawrence Lessig

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.

As I’ve indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.

You and I both know that as long as our representatives are held hostage to their funders – and their funders are not all of us – our system will not work.

Code will be a central tool in this analysis. It will present the greatest threat to both liberal and libertarian ideals, as well as their greatest promise. We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us.

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.

Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state. Liberty there, as anywhere, will come from a state of a certain kind. We build a world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self-conscious control, but by setting it in a place where a particular kind of self-conscious control survives. We build liberty as our founders did, by setting society upon a certain constitution.

I’m focused on solving the problem that would make it plausible for gov’t to get back to solving real problems.

I spend as little time with lawmakers as possible. Many are great. And more than you expect want real change. But they’re not going to do anything till we, the outsiders, force them to adopt it.