Lawrence Lessig

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ They don't get why rearchitecting the network destroys innovation and creativity. They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Except, your freedom, which has increasingly been taken away by those who recognize that the future is against them and they have the power in D.C. to protect themselves against that future. Free society be damned. ”

“ Not even before the birth of free culture, not in 1773 when copyrights were perpetual, because again, they only controlled printing. How many people had printers? You could do what you wanted with these works. Ordinary uses were completely unregulated. But today, your life is perpetually regulated in the world that you live in. It is controlled by the law. Here is the refrain: Creativity depends on stopping that control. They will always try to impose it; we are free to the extent [that] we resist it, but we are increasingly not free. ”

“ 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 left and right issue. This is the important thing to recognize: This is not about conservatives versus liberals.
In our case, in Eldred, we have this brief filed by 17 economists, including Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Kost, Ken Arrow, you know, lunatics, right? Left-wing liberals, right? Friedman said he'd only join if the word "no-brainer" existed in the brief somewhere, like this was a complete no-brainer for him. This is not about left and right. This is about right and wrong. That's what this battle is. ”

“ Here's what he wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today". Here's the first thing I'm sure you've read of Bill Gates which you all 100 percent agree with. Gates is right, absolutely right. Then we shift into the genius business man: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. ”

“ 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 Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill".
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. ”

“ Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it. What, not spend 700 years in Washington? He says, you know, I like you guys, but seven years is enough, eight years is too much. I'm out of here. Just about the time J.C. Watts came to Washington, this war on free code and free culture began. Just about that time.
In an interview two days ago, Watts said, "Here's the problem with Washington: ”

“ Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons", Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, "Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds.". ”

“ And this site actually wanted to help you hack your dog to teach your dog to dance jazz. Remember (Europeans are sometimes confused about this) , it's not a crime to dance jazz in the United States. This is a completely permissible activity—even for a dog to dance jazz. In Georgia, there are a couple jurisdictions I'm not sure about [laughter] , but mainly, dancing jazz is an OK activity. So Aibopet.com said, "Here, here's how to hack your dog to make it dance jazz." If anything, it would be a fair use of this piece of plastic that costs over $1,500. You would think, "This is a fair use". ”

“ Apologists who say, "Oh, we've always patented everything, therefore we should continue to patent this". People like Greg Aharonian, who goes around and says "See, every single patent out there is idiotic. ”