Lawrence Lessig Quotes

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.

I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not doing it to make a profit off my labor. You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain by now. What a better world it would be if other people were doing things with Mickey Mouse!

A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.

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.

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

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.

Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media.

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

Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

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.

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 Supreme Court has crafted doctrines such as 'fair use,' which permits copying materials for criticism, parody, and transformative uses, and has ruled that abstract ideas are not subject to copyright, because courts will not punish people for merely using an abstract concept in speech.

If someone has copyright over some piece of your stuff, you can sell it without permission from the copyright holder because the copyright holder can only control the 'first-sale.' The Supreme Court has recognized this doctrine since 1908.

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple in copyright law, and when it comes to music copyright, it's especially convoluted.

Copyright law is too confusing.

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.

When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.