Lawrence Lessig Quotes

There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.

The question is - did Richard Attenborough have a right to make 'Gandhi?' And did Danny Boyle have a right to make 'Slumdog Millionaire?' Quite honestly, if they didn't have the right to make these films, I had no right to make 'Elizabeth.'

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

People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it's a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property.

I don't believe in the ownership of work.

If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house.

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

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom.

I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?

A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

Copyright is too valuable to be wholly renounced.

The ministry of culture is nowhere, but cultural life is everywhere.

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

… people should not be hindered from attaining development in accordance with their own culture.

We would reduce copyright terms to a more sensible term of 10 years.

All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.

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 pursuit of civil rights by copyright.

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.

Jazz at Lincoln Center is something that is very necessary for the creative process. There's a couple of brothers running around New York, trying to buy up the cultural places, who shall remain nameless. Well, there's a lot of brothers - pick any two. Pin the tail on the... they want to buy up stuff and steer the country a certain way.