Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good - for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

- Lawrence Lessig

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

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

- Lawrence Lessig

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

- 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

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'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

If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

- Lawrence Lessig

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

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

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

- Lawrence Lessig

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

- Lawrence Lessig

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

- Lawrence Lessig

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

- 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

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

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

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