Quote #15

If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:

More from Lawrence Lessig

  1. The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclos…
  2. In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyr…
  3. I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software - from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once.…
  4. That free culture was carried to America; that was our birth - 1790. We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was u…
  5. 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 …
  6. Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Dis…
  7. The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is…
  8. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people…

All Lawrence Lessig quotes