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. - Lawrence Lessig

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

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

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. - Lawrence Lessig

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

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

So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we do not even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. - Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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. - Lawrence Lessig

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

Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we have seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts do not get in the way of this ideology. - Lawrence Lessig

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

In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt. - Lawrence Lessig

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

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