A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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

As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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 because there are no formalities.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

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.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.
- Lawrence Lessig Quote