Lawrence Lessig Quotes

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

Purchasing and downloading a book on to your e-reader won't necessarily protect it from disappearing.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

Records became much cruder in the last 20 years. Let's put it that way.

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

We just want to be a band and play good music.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.

There's just no escaping it: The half-life of media on the Internet is super short. Tweets flow and fade; pages that look great today will be gone or, at best, riddled with broken links and outmoded code in five years, tops.

And because technology is moving so rapidly, things become obsolete very, very quickly. In 15 years time, Will Caster is probably going to be in some weird room in Vegas where people are plugging quarters into him. Who has a mini-disc of a laser disc player? It's over!

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.

For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.