Lawrence Lessig Quotes

I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.

While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.

I think, once recipes become digital, pirating a digital recipe and all the questions that you have with music and so forth will become pertinent to food as well.

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. 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.

Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.

This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection.

I'm a huge fan of e-books, but the more I buy and download, the more I worry that someone could just take them all away from me.

In making policy designed with copyright in mind, you end up making decisions about whether other important technologies, such as privacy-enhancing or file-search technologies, should be encouraged or discouraged. A collision is happening between creativity and protecting IP.

People think that it's their sovereign right to download music and not have to pay for it.

I think there are problems with compact disc copy protection that can't be resolved.

I hope that the movie industry will learn from the experiences of the music industry and will be much more constructive in their approach to P2P.

The U.S. government is saying that my website enabled piracy when the entire Internet is enabling piracy. Every ISP that connects people to the Internet is enabling piracy - Google is, YouTube is, everybody is.

All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers' rights. We cannot have that.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.

A brainy person does not abuse copyright; instead they respect it and uphold it.

I understand the worries of many - not only here in this auditorium -, and some have already written to me to say that technical progress has lowered the threshold that stops people from helping themselves to protected works without the slightest embarrassment.

I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods.

One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things.

An intellectual property worker will take copyright protection on everything he can get.