Lawrence Lessig Quotes

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.

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.

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

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically.

I'm of course disillusioned with what has happened to World cinema. Now cinemas in both Eastern and Western Europe are filled with the same blockbusters from Hollywood.

Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

Europe, mourning the loss of its century-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception” clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

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.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.

The United States, in its early years engaged in massive illegal smuggling of intellectual properties from other counties…. The United states was a hotbed of intellectual piracy in the 19th century…. It was a way of jump-starting our industrial democracy…. Today we tell emerging nations, “do as we say, not as we did.”

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

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.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful...

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.