Lawrence Lessig

“ OK, so first of all, this reality of opaque creativity, you know that as proprietary code. Creativity where you don't get to see how the thing works, and the law protects the thing you can't see. It's not Shakespeare that you can study and understand because the code is, by nature, open. Nature has been reformed in our modern, technological era, so nature can be hidden and the law still protects it—and not just through the protection, but through increasing control of uses of creative work. ”

“ But rather than actually paying for what we buy, the politicians pander to the rich to keep their taxes low. Indeed, some of the richest Americans -- hedge fund managers -- pay among the lowest tax rates. Yes despite the fact that not once in the past 20 year has Gallup found even a third of Americans who think the tax burden on "upper income people" is "fair," Congress has done nothing.
On every issue that matters to America, Congress doesn't listen to America. One every issue that matters to America, Congress listens to the funders of their campaigns.
America's government has been bought. ”

“ You or the GNU, you can pick, build a world of transparent creativity—that's your job, this weird exception in the 21st century of an industry devoted to transparent creativity, the free sharing of knowledge. It was not a choice in 1790; it was nature in 1790. You are rebuilding nature. This is what you do. You build a common base that other people can build upon. You make money, oh well, not enough, but some of you make money off of this. ”

“ Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories.
Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?". I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control? ”

“ Not for a reform that will happen some day -- become "some day" reforms never happen. Instead, we will take up a fight for a reform that will happen not some day, but on day one. A day one reform, to fix our democracy -- or maybe that's, to unfix our democracy -- to get us a representative democracy that could represent us. ”

“ That I will give every ounce of my energy and my soul to wage a campaign that could rally all of America -- not just Democrats or Republicans, but all citizens -- to this fundamental ideal -- that in a democracy, all have a right to be equal citizens. ”

“ A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing now to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author—there are fewer and fewer of those people out there—to life plus 70 years. That's the expansion of law, but also there's been an expansion of control through technology. ”

“ If you understand this refrain, you're gonna understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society. ”

“ America's government has been bought by the cronies and special interests. America's government has been bought not by those who care about America, but by those who want to use our government to get rich. ”

“ We must promise our children the same patriotism and love. We must finally find a way to make good on the promise to give them a democracy that works. We must have the courage and the patriotism to rise to an idea that was given to this nation more than 200 years ago.
Because if we don't, then 7,303 days from today, our children won't be looking back at two politicians, and chuckling at how the politicians always promise reform some day, and how some day really means never. Instead our children will be looking back at us. ”

“ Ask a venture capitalist how much money he is willing to invest in new technology that would touch content in a way that Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti don't sign off on. The answer is a simple one: Zero. Zero.
They've shut down an industry and innovation in the name of this terrorist war, and this is the cause. This is the harm. Five percent.
And what have you done about it? It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests that has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. ”

“ That's is not to say that is the first time Americans have fought for democracy. Soldiers in America volunteer to defend our democracy with their life. They go to the field with a backpack, not a SuperPAC. My grandfather joined millions to fight fascism across the world. And our forebears fought a revolution to free ourselves from governments controlled by Donald Trump -- sorry, I mean aristocrats. We have been fighting for the ideal of equal citizens since the beginning of the time of American citizens. ”

“ Book sellers in 1760 had no conception of the power that you coders would give them some day in the future, and that control adds to this expansion of law. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before. Right? Because here, here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Stop talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use ”

“ The America we live in today would be unrecognizable even twenty years ago. 400 families have given half the money in this election cycle so far. That's not American democracy. That's banana republic democracy. We have a Congress that is dependent on the tiniest fraction of the 1% to fund their campaigns. A Congress that bends over backwards to keep those funders happy. A Congress that is not free to lead, because it is bound to its funders. A Congress that has been corrupted by the system they have allowed to evolve for funding their campaigns. ”

“ The meaning is: no one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm, that though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned.
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. ”

“ There is a connection between what the economic elite want and what our government does. There is a connection between what special interests group want and what our government does. But there is no connection between what the average voter wants and what our government does -- in a democracy; in a representative democracy, Congress does not represent the people. ”

“ But as Dan Gillmor has quoted, "They've also said, look, the Open Source Movement out there has got to realize that there are a lot of patents at stake, and don't imagine we won't use them when we must".
Now, the thing about patents is, they're not nuclear weapons. It's not physics that makes them powerful, it's lawyers and lawmakers and Congress. And the thing is, you can fight all you want against the physics that make a nuclear weapon destroy all of mankind, but you can not succeed at all. ”

“ This is not a democracy any more. In no sense of the word, it is this a representative democracy any more. The basic commitment that our framers made -- of a Congress dependent on the people alone, where the "people", as Madison promised, meant "not the rich more than the poor" -- that basic promise has been betrayed by the politicians. And it is time that we -- we who are citizens, we who are not politicians -- fight to get it back. ”

“ This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning it into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories which are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. ”

“ Now I'm all for success in America. The promise of getting rich by creating and innovating drives the American spirit. I know this, because my dad was a entrepreneur. I saw how it drove him.
But entrepreneurs succeed by working harder. By competing better. By creating more. They succeeded by innovating, not by hiring lobbyists to get them a special tax favor. ”

“ Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. ”

“ 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 copyright was stopped. In 1710, the statute of Anne said that copyright should be for a limited term of just 14 years. But in the 1740s, when Scottish publishers started reprinting classics (you gotta love the Scots) , the London publishers said "Stop!". They said, "Copyright is forever!". Sonny Bono said "Copyright should be forever minus a day", but the London publishers said "Copyright is forever".
These publishers, people whom Milton referred to as "Old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book selling, men who do not labor in an honest profession ”