We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.
Lawrence LessigWe are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.
Lawrence LessigI'm pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can't work.
Lawrence LessigI am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't.
Lawrence LessigIn a time of polarized politics there's one thing that more than ninety percent of Americans agree on, that our government is broken, and broken because of the money in politics.
Lawrence LessigA free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.
Lawrence Lessig