Lawrence Lessig

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1961 age 0

   Born

2. 2010 age 49

   CreditTruth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia

• RBRichard Branson1 title
• SGScott Glosserman1 title
• NHNic Hill1 title
• NCNoam Chomsky1 title
• HZHoward Zinn1 title
• RKRaymond Kurzweil1 title
• VCVint Cerf1 title
• JWJimmy Wales1 title
• DTDon Tapscott1 title
• JLJaron Lanier1 title

• When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0

• We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut."

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0

• One thing we know about incentives is you can't incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, [even if] we can give him all the money in the world.

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It's a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation.<br /> We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can't show it's going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly.

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0

• There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed. … So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.

  Lawrence Lessig, CC BY-SA 4.0