Lawrence Lessig Quotes

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth — 1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.

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.

Creativity in copyright law only means that you didn’t copy it from someone else …. Most works that are protected under copyright are not creative in the colloquial sense of the word.

With the copyright now extended to the life of the creator plus 100 years, for the first time in history no person henceforth will ever be able to freely use any work created in his lifetime.

The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity.

'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

You can do whatever you want with my work.

If I would use anything from 'The Little Prince,' even some little quote, it's all copyrighted in France. Like Walt Disney in this country, it's a national treasure.

For the general good of the world [written work] should be understood as … belonging to the publick.

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

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it ., Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past ., Ours is less and less a free society.

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

We would reduce copyright terms to a more sensible term of 10 years.

For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Whether it's a song you write or a television show or a movie or professional wrestling, there are three components to IP law. There is publishing, there are writers, and there are performers. The publisher is always the owner.

From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.

The problem with copyright is it only protects that literal work. It doesn't protect the design and the ideas. That's unfortunate.

You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

This song ain't black or white and as far as I know it don't infringe on anyone's copyright.

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