3 Lawrence Lessig Quotes on Balance

Lawrence Lessig quotes on balance

32. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A 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. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.

45. We Americans have a long history of fighting 'big,' wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight 'big' again is not something new. It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of 'intellectual property.' Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called 'property' is not well exercised within this tradition anymore. If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy.

47. Common sense is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the extremes - as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid. If that really is the choice, then the warriors should win. The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who believe in maximal copyright - 'All Rights Reserved' - and those who reject copyright - 'No Rights Reserved.' The 'All Rights Reserved' sorts believe that you should ask permission before you 'use' a copyrighted work in any way. The 'No Rights Reserved' sorts believe you should be able to do with content as you wish, regardless of whether you have permission or not. ... What's needed is a way to say something in the middle - neither 'all rights reserved' nor 'no rights reserved' but 'some rights reserved' - and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take for granted before.