Lawrence Lessig Quotes
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin Press, 2004, p. 222.
Guthrie was one of the many people who used the copyright law to prevent someone else from restricting the information and allowing wide utilization of their proprietary material. This is sometimes called “copyleft.” This quotation collection is another example of copyrighted material with broad encouragement of utilization.
In early America, the United States did NOT participate in the European International Copyright convention. The American purpose of copyright was not to protect authors and intellectual property owners, but to promote knowledge and culture. The original purpose was to limit the time during with an author could control his/her creative work so that the society as a whole can get maximum benefit. With the rise of large corporate intellectual property owners with strong lobbyists, they have been able to change the copyright law to greatly enlarge their time and methods of control. The Pirate Party wants to go back to the original intention of the Founding Fathers.
In America it used to be 26 years with a renewal for an additional 26 years. However, Mickey Mouse was about to go into the Public Domain, and Walt Disney and other large copyright holders lobbied to extend the copyright term to the life of the author plus 100 years. See {624751}.
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but withdrew before the primaries.
