Lawrence Lessig Quotes

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid.

If you wrote something, you deserve to get paid and recognized for your work. No one should take a bow with another man's hat.

I firmly believe artists should be paid for what they create.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly ... It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

No one can come and claim ownership of my work. I am the creator of it, and it lives within me.

Luther Campbell is the only person that has ever paid me for sampling me. I'm out for the rest of 'em, but the young man paid me.

Only I hold the right to all my songs.

Property is impossible.

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

I charged Rs 101 for the rights to my biopic.

If someone builds a fortune, it belongs to him, not the government. An entitled government undermines liberty.

I think if you contribute to a job, and it's repeated and repeated, and sold over the world, and the producers are making millions, you should benefit from it.

If I inspire you, pay for it, period.

Someone said, and rightfully, that "property is theft'." There's no way a man can stand and tell me that he owns an apple tree. I just don't believe you. And so this pursuit of position and money and power, they are all wrapped up into one package that I think is crippling, debilitating and limiting. And unfortunately, people get sucked into it and then they've got you on the treadmill. You know: ''You've got to have a good job'' and "You've got to have a good education'' - which is another word for indoctrination. We're never going to rise above these limitations we've placed on ourselves.

Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent.

The program of liberalism if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production.